Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #11 - January 14th 1982: David Van Day's Chart Music

Episode Date: September 20, 2017

The eleventh episode of the podcast which asks: is anyone willing to swap a Fonz action figure for a ‘Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets – Heterosexual Rock n’ Roll’ badge? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, has been a bastard to put together, and the sound quality may be a bit manky at times - but oh, what a glistening slab of televisual spangliness awaits us. It’s a full-on Flags & Balloons TOTP, this one, overseen by the circular face of The Hairy Breakfast Brunch Bar (who has wisely been kept away from The Kids and is monitored at all times), and the air is ripe with the soggy Lycra tang of the universally-despised Zoo. But no matter – this episode is a veritable time capsule of the early 80s. Kool and The Gang drop the world’s most unwatchable video ever, which is danced to by another not-very-good troupe, Shakin’ Stevens places his white-shod foot upon the throat of the charts of the Eighties, DLT commands the BBC cameramen to stalk Claire Grogan at all times, The Stranglers look on in disgust at Zoo, and there’s the longest discussion of Brown Sauce ever conducted by three grown men. And Dollar. And Bucks Fizz. Al Needham is joined by Taylor Parkes and Simon Price for a solid examination of a glorious episode of The Pops, veering off to brag about who they’ve had a drink with, why you shouldn’t use Dettol to treat facial acne, seeing Morph laid out in a glass coffin, the declining standards of World Cup mascots, and getting battered on Top Of The Form because of Noel fucking Coward. And swearing. AND Chris Needham’s new record!   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you like listening to? Erm... Chart music. Chart music. Hey up you pop-crazed youngsters and welcome to the latest edition of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hand right down the back of the settee of a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and as always I'm joined by two people who honed and sharpened their critical knives upon the very grindstone of Melody Maker back in the day. First up, my man Taylor Parks. Hey up Taylor. Alright, how you doing?

Very well sir, very well. And it's a welcome return to Mr say up taylor all right how you doing very well sir very well and it's a welcome return to mr simon price hello al how you doing at the beginning of every show i always say have you done anything pop and interesting of of late and uh i'm not i'm not even going to bother asking that because i trump all of you because i crashed over at Chris Needham's house the other week. What the fuck? Yes, yes. And I met Gav Skinner, who was the guitarist of A Higher Standard, who was basically the Janine of Manslaughter. I trust you're talking to the listeners here, Al,

because we know. Yeah, yes. Yes, I am, yes. And I also met his brother as well, John, who was Britain's youngest thrash metal fan and isn't anymore. Still a thrash metal fan, but a little bit older. And most importantly, Chris gave me his latest album.

And there's a track on it which caught my eye called The Predator Becomes The Prey. And I thought, oh, fucking hell, this is going to be a song about paedophile vigilante groups or something like that. track on it which uh caught my eye called the predator becomes the prey and i thought oh fucking hell this is going to be a song about uh pedophile vigilante groups or something like that no it's about pike fishing that's magnificent and probably the first song ever which samples a bite alarm see al you've given us all these minor details and i'm not complaining they're great details but why did you end up sleeping at Chris Needham's house? He invited me over What?

He rang me up and said, oh my parents are away on holiday come round and get pissed off and I went, yeah alright then, fair enough You and him are that close, you're like that? Oh god, yeah, yeah, yeah A little bit of backstory for people who don't know I became an obsessive about In Bed With Chris Needham

which is one of the reasons why me and Taylor and Simon connected so quickly when we met on a forum, when Simon said it's the greatest music documentary ever. Yeah. And I ended up interviewing Chris for the local magazine, which I edited, even though he doesn't come from Nottingham. I thought I'm going to interview him anyway. And we got on like a house on fire. We did couple of uh q and a's at heavy metal film festivals so yeah

yeah we kind of know each other now and uh yeah went around his house got pissed up because it was gav skinner's birthday and i'm impressed but if you can score yourself a night around blue tulip rose reed's house then i want to hear about it oh well that's the next step isn't it that is that is the next step so you know who we are and you know what we're here for yet another binge upon the carcass of an episode of top of the pops this week we're landing bang in the middle of top of the pops as flags and balloons period with an episode from january the 14th 1982 now then simon we're about four months away from the show we covered in a previous Chart Music, Chart Music number eight.

And, you know, we did love that episode, didn't we? But things seem very different by looking at this. Can you tell us what you think has happened between then and now? I think almost imperceptibly, some of the kind of edge of 1981 music has started to soften in 82. And, you know, you describe it as the flags and balloons period. And I think that is not just Top of the Pops, that's happening to pop in general. We're moving towards what became known as the new pop. I think the high point of that would have been 83.

But we are moving towards a kind of new frivolity yeah in pop which um actually you know there's there's plenty to be said for that but as a kind of dodgy old goth um obviously i kind of lament the passing of the kind of slightly noir um aspect that um you know pertained to to the great records of 81 because for for a lot of people, you flip your coin between 81 and 82 for the best music year ever, don't you? I've heard a lot of people say that. I know a lot of 82 fans, but for me, it's 79.

I mean, we talked about this before, 79 or 81. 82, a lot of my favourite bands were kind of in decline by this point, particularly because I was into Two Tone, Scar and all of that. I think I was sulking because those bands weren't having big hits anymore yeah some of them would even split up you know um so yeah i i was still kind of you know clinging to the uh centimeter long

rude boy haircut and and and and the um and the appropriate clothing but um i just felt that pop was moving away from me in a direction I didn't quite understand. Tell us about your club, Simon. You don't think you've set up enough on this, I don't think. All right. OK, yeah, well, I've been doing this club called Spellbound for the best part of a decade now down in Brighton. And we call it, kind of jokingly, the 80s night for people who hate 80s nights. And basically the idea is that most 80s club nights you go to really focus on the cheese. You know, they're usually run by kind of students who weren't even there at the time. Yeah.

And who just think it's all like big phones and shoulder pads and, you know, cocktails and all of that. Yeah. Which is fine. Don't get me wrong. There's a place for that. But I kind of wanted to celebrate the stuff that gets left behind, which is, I guess, the alternative side of the 80s. that gets left behind which is i guess the alternative side of the 80s so you know we just play loads of susie and the banshees talking heads the smiths the cure the specials um killing joe echo the bunny man all that kind of stuff and um don't you do don't you play any oasis or anything

well they are from the 90s out oh well yeah that's true yeah yeah yeah well we actually we actually had a late 80s special recently just so we could play a bit of stone roses and happy mondays which is oh good you never hear them do you in clubs nowadays at all no no no uh but normally we concentrate on 79 to 85 so talking basically um tubeway army on top of the pops through to live aid is the kind of golden golden years right um of of what we do um yeah so so it's it's something you know even at the time as as we were living through this era that we're looking at now i did think that you know this is some kind of renaissance of pop it's some kind of great golden age digging underneath the charts it was right there in the charts um so you know um yeah it came to you that's that's what it was um great music came to you it came to

you in fucking woolworths you didn't have to go you didn't have to go to the cool kind of indie record shop yeah although i did spillers in cardiff legendary record shop in cardiff i went there too but you know you could find stuff in the um 49 pence discount x chart racks even in your local news agent that was absolutely brilliant you know those kind of spinners for greetings cards they used to have those but with x x chart x jukebox records with a big hole in the middle um and you could build a brilliant record collection that's right really quickly and really cheaply around that time. And I just did have this sense that everything was sort of falling into place,

and it was just a fantastic time for music. Taylor, this era, were you an 80s kid? Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking about Stone Roses and Happy Mondays fans. They're like the new baby boomers, aren't they? Yes. They're like the moobersers aren't they yes the moobers too many carb heavy snacks yeah they're currently showing 1984 on the bbc repeats right and we did in 1984 uh one on one ago the difference is astonishing and you it's easy to forget this

now that pop time moves so slowly as we approach heat death the 1984 is already the long eighties right it's you've already got that uh it's like a messy gleam it's like a chaos of uh sort of tatty aesthetics but it's all held together with this thick glaze, this thick cocaine-speckled glaze. Whereas 1982 still looks like people doing people things in various interesting ways. But it's fading just a little. There's a slightly less dense concentration of ideas in 82 than there was in 81. And you can just about, you know, if you know what to look for, you can just about you know if you know what to look for you can just about sense the next ice age starting to blow in um but it was it was great i mean you know

in the real world 1982 was something of a trough but it was a good year for pop and it was all i was having an okay time too i was nine or ten uh just got into radio for comedies yeah my my friend at school who's now a quite successful record producer and dj came from a slightly more sort of middle class family than i did i mean in quite a nice way we were sort of lower middle class just come up from working class and a bit gauche. Whereas his folks were sort of arty, lefty, middle class, like eating pasta in 1982. God. In 1982, eating pasta.

That's ridiculous. Listening to folk music. And the words Italian. No, no, no. They read The Guardian. That was what it was. I'd go around their house and smell this cooking and hear about the Labour Party

and get introduced to The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and yeah week ending and stuff and when you're 10 um and you you know you you come from the scum this is like a new world somewhere i've got a few old episodes of week ending and it's i mean you listen to it now it's all parodies of under milk wood about lewis murphy colliery you know and sea shanties about the cold war but um at the time i'd listen to it and i'd feel like i was an adult that was the thing i feel like i was laughing at adult things not not realizing yeah but not realizing what it really meant is that week ending was pitched about the right intellectual level for a bright 10 year old yes my my my equivalent of that was not the nine o'clock news yes not so much not so much the tv show which i think maybe

had finished by this point but they kept bringing out books yes and these kind of calendar diary things like not 1982 not 1983 that's right yeah and just just the humor they were making in there i didn't quite understand it, but just the fact that they were laughing at kind of establishment stuff in a way that I didn't realise you were allowed to, was quite formative, I think. And when you look back now, yeah, I mean, as Taylor says, a lot of it's absolute crap, but it had its place, it performed its role in my life, definitely. Because it's really funny, because at this time, I was listening to Weekended and stuff

like that, because for some bizarre bizarre reason my school entered a team in top of the form and i was in it and the first round we mashed down this school from darby and then the second round we went up against uh a public school from redding and we got absolutely fucking battered what i was like eating Eton Rifle. Yeah, it was exactly like the fucking Eton Rifle. No, Scumbag College and the Young Ones. Yeah. Some of your lads said they'd be back next week. Yes.

The music round was fucking Noel Coward. I remember because it was a radio link, so I'm sat there on the assembly stage in front of my school, and they were radio linking their fucking much better school. And everyone on my team were just looking at each other with Noel Cowell came on and go, who the fuck is this cunt? And I've hated him ever since.

And if it was about bad manners and shawady wady, you'd have kicked their ass. Oh, yeah. If it had been lip up fat air, we'd have fucking killed them. That's like I was in a school books quiz once right

and it was like we were already trying our luck as a sort of proletarian school in a books quiz and made it to the tie break and the question was

about the bible oh dear yeah no that was the end of that. Radio 1 News So, what was in the news this week? Well, 81 people have been killed in the Potomac River after

an air crash in Washington. There's been another national rail strike in the UK. Oliver Reed has returned to Heathrow Airport with his 17-year-old girlfriend. A document emerges claiming that the USA were planning to drop three more atomic bombs in 1945. Enver Hoxha, the leader of Albania, makes a public appearance which crushes the rumour that he's been killed in a gunfight with his deputy leader. And we're all awaiting the draw of the 1982 World Cup at the end of the week.

Well, me and Taylor are. I don't know about you, Simon. I was really excited, man. Yeah, yeah. Don't leave me out your football narrative. I had the Espana 82 Panini book, and I filled it. Good man. All of it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, man. Fucking respect. I was obsessed with those little pictures that each city had. Yeah. They were done by proper artists like Juan Miro. That's right, yeah. They have a big picture of Naranja on the front. I liked him.

Yes, yes, it did. He was good, wasn't he? That was the days when, you know, football World Cup mascots were just decent, weren't they? Just a big orange with some shorts on and a football. Yeah. Nowadays, can you remember the last one? No, it all went wrong with footics.

Yeah. 82 was my favourite World Cup, I think. That was 78. 78 is the first I remember. Yeah. But 82 just seemed completely magical, I think. I mean, this is probably something for another podcast, but what a brilliant World Cup.

Even the whole intrigue, you know, the whole scandal with Austria and Germany and all of that. It was just a perfect World Cup. I think 78 shades it for me, simply because there was British disaster, but it didn't involve England for a change. So that was quite entertaining. But no, I was quite upset that Scotland was shit.

Because, you know, I had much investment due to all the Forest players in it. So, yeah. But the big news this week is that Margaret Thatcher's fuckwitted son has been found in the sahara desert after getting lost for six days yeah i bet week ending had something to say about that oh you can imagine even to this day i can't listen to party fears 2 which is one of my favorite early 80s pop singles without hearing the name of all these two-bit gag writers it's like standing at a

light entertainment cenotaph hearing this really long list of news lines by oh god nick brown and ian hendry it's just oh never has apologies nick and ian if you're listening i don't know if they're still alive the cover of the enemy this week adamant the cover of smash NME this week, Adam Ant. The cover of Smash Hits this week, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. But Smash Hits have just had their readers poll for 1981. Shall we see how we get on? Best band, 1981. Human League. Taylor?

Adam and the Ants. Adam and the Ants. Yes. 1-0 to Taylor. Best male singer? Adam Ant. Yeah, it must be gary newman oh oh what of course that would be a separate category wouldn't it best female singer toyah oh uh uh debbie harry toyah yeah of course yeah i'm getting the wrong yeah yeah yeah your favorite as well

taylor i hate toyah you love her yeah oh don't know when she come when she crops up on this show oh god she's getting in the neck best single of 1981 oh god do you know what probably i would have said don't you want me by the human league League, but probably the forms would have gone out. Voting is closed, yeah. It's like PFA for all of the year. I don't know. Stand and Deliver. I'm going to

copy that, yeah. Tainted Love by Soft Cell. Oh, yeah, yeah. Should have thought of that. Best LP of 1981. Dare. I can't even think of any LPs from 1981. Dare by The Human League. Yeah, because of course it is.

You know what I mean? Of course it's going to be that. In your face, Park. Most promising act for 1982? Bow, wow, wow. The birthday party. Altered images. Of course.

Most appalling single of 1981? Shut Up Your Face by Joe Dolce. You'd think, wouldn't you? I don't like this game. Oh, Superman. Oh, no. Yeah. Laurie Anderson.

It's actually kind of good. And the best television show? Top of the Pops. Not the 9 o'clock news. Top of the Pops beating Not the 9 o'clock news. Top of the Pops beating Not the 9 o'clock news into second place. I'll chuck a bonus question in here. Which singer had Tainted Love as his worst single of the year? Rod Stewart.

Paul Weller. He was very catty, wasn't he, around that time, Paul Weller? He didn't like synthesizer music. He thought it was faceless and inhuman. Just pressing a button, didn't he? Yeah, you just press a button and tainted love comes out. Where's the fire and skill in that? So the number one LP in the UK this week is Love Songs by Barbra Streisand.

In America, the number one single is Physical by Olivia Newton-John. And the number one LP in the US is For Those About To Rock by ACDC. So, my friends, what were you doing in January of 1982? I'll give you a bit of a clue on this one. You were probably freezing your tits off because it was dead code. Well, I was 14 years old um as we've already established in the episode that uh that that was about uh you know just three and a half months earlier wasn't it the last last one i did um living in barry south glamorgan third year of

barry boys comprehensive school spending most of my time in my bedroom overlooking the docks the fairground, the sea. Like a Welsh Bruce Springsteen, aren't you, Simon? Yeah, yeah, that's how I think of myself. But in the distance, glamorous England. I could see Western Supermare twinkling. Oh, God. My head, Somerset. Sexy Somerset.

Wow. And I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of that bedroom because I was using the bed frame as the base for a Subutio stadium. Oh, well played that man. My mum was really annoyed because she couldn't get in with the Hoover. But yeah, the entire floor was either my bed or the Subutio stadium.

It was a stadium that went three sides round. I had to have one side clear to get my arms in. It's a bit like, do you remember Brisbane Road? Late in Orient's crowd had one side missing. It's pretty much that. Yeah, oh nice. And the other thing was... What teams did you have? Oh, late in Orient's crowd, had one side missing? It's pretty much that. Yeah, oh, nice. And the other thing was... What teams did you have?

Oh, I had them all. I had so many, about 20 or 30 teams, but the old ones that you got from Jumbo Sales were the best because they had lead weights in the base and the players were crouched down a bit, so a lower sense of gravity.

So there was a great old Wolves team I had like that, an old Celteltic one that had really heavy bases so meant that if you did a free kick it really fucking hammered it it was brilliant yeah um just a team of cloggers um it's nice you spend enough time around lead as a child and you too could grow up to be a music journalist and also perhaps coincidentally i don't know but um the hormones would start to kick in um around this time and i got bad skin i really did um so uh basically i was putting detol directly onto my face because i thought detol was the same as tcp i didn't realize i thought

it's basically like you've got coca-cola and pepsi right and you've got detol and tcp i didn't realize you meant to dilute it so i just put it straight onto my skin where there had been a spot and it burnt like fuck and just made matters worse so i so i had this kind of recurring scab right in the middle of my chin and another one on my top lip that was there for probably about 18 months two years this is why i didn't have a girlfriend till i was about 17 um oh man You probably thought Biactol was a nearby village, didn't you? I was putting on the Clearasil. The sad thing about Clearasil, right,

it was meant to be sort of like skin colour. It was meant to blend in so nobody would notice. But basically, the colour was kind of Des O'Connor, you know what I'm saying? So, yeah, it wasn't very unobtrusive on a pale welsh kid um and also um i i think my my family were trying to sort of tell me to put childish things such as sabutio aside because the christmas that happened a couple of weeks earlier before this episode i was given um a cheap bottle of blue stratos aftershave and and um and a battery operated shaver probably a hint that i was growing a bit

of a kind of oh my son is becoming a man it's my granddad actually i think he was gently hinting that i was growing a bit of a bum fluff mustache which needed to be dealt with and i was like oh man what i wanted was another subutio team or something but yeah yeah and um and musically i was i was as i mentioned still clinging on the arse end of Tuto I was massively into Human League on the back of the Dare album which had come out

you know the end of 81 obsessed with Dexys Midnight Runners and later that year I would discover a love of ABC and Culture Club

but that hadn't happened yet Taylor I was still nine so just good cheer what did you remember what you had for Christmas no Taylor? I was still nine, so just good cheer. Did you remember what you had for Christmas?

No, probably a couple of records because I was just getting into music. But no, my problem is that from around this time, all my stories are so ordinary and commonplace that I'd just be in Mac be in mcconieville or stare away from that no we don't want to go but you know what i mean it'd just be like oh yeah you remember those uh astro wars or no i never had astro wars i had galaxy invader which was the cheap version did you but yeah yeah i think this could have been the christmas where got an Atari. So, yeah, I was a very popular boy on my street. I see. My mate, have I told this story before?

This is sufficiently unusual to not quite be in Young Comedian you've never heard of on stuff about the old days program territory. My mate down the road had an Atari. Yeah. And his mum wouldn't let any of his mates have a go right because it was like in case they broke it or something um which sort of takes a bit of the fun away just a bit it's always have you ever seen the controllers yeah joysticks are indestructible short of putting them into a car crusher, I don't see how you could have broken them.

That's kind of how they were designed. My stepbrothers had an Atari, so when I went around their house, which is usually on a Sunday, they couldn't fucking kick me out of there. I was there for hours playing on... I don't know if it's called Defender or something, but it's basically sort of like a linear

sort of shoot them up uh space machine space rocket yeah and again and also there was frogger and um yes there was this kind of tarzan thing where he's swinging through the jungle oh pitfall is that it yeah yeah yeah landing on the heads of crocodiles and shit like that i loved it yeah so you know that was great my sister used to my sister used to jump on that and do kind of like gymnastics routines on the crocodile's heads. But there was one time I was working,

the first magazine job I had was for a Sega Mega Drive magazine. And someone wrote in saying that his mate, this was round about, this was early 90s, so it was Torval and Dean were making a comeback and that. And he was forced to play the Mega Drive with his sister and the only game he wanted to play was Mortal Kombat. So instead of him and his sister

trying to rip each other's hearts out and show it to them before they died, she'd insist that they put some music on and they would do kind of like dance routines with fucking Raiden and johnny cage or whoever it was and then and then she'd give give them marks out of 10 so his mate wrote two words to coat him down and he was duly coated down in the next issue of the magazine so what else was on tv on this sparkly winter's day well bbc one has broadcast Play School, Laurel and Arde,

Jack and Ore with Rodney Bewes, Newsround, Blue Peter, Nationwide, and of course, Tomorrow's World. BBC Two has sent Robert Robinson on a journey across India

on Robinson's travels, has just screened Muggeridge, Ancient and Modern, about Malcolm Muggeridge's childhood in Croydon, and is just about to run a repeat of all creatures great and small. ITV has run Danger Mass, Happy Days, Crossroads, Emmerdale Farm and is currently showing the film The Way We Were with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford.

So yeah, not a brilliant day for telly. I don't know, danger mouse was just starting wasn't it so that that would have been good i was a bit old for it i think it's more taylor's generation that yeah no big danger mouse fan yeah happy days by this time you were just bored of it really wanted it was it had its time in the in the late 70s but by 1982 the fonz just didn't seem cool anymore did it are you saying that it jumped the shark? Yes. Yes, exactly, yes.

I thought that it was from the 50s. I didn't realise when I watched Happy Days as a kid. Really? It had just been made. I assumed it must be a programme from the 50s, yeah. Right, Happy Days, right? In the late 70s, when it was at its peak, that action figure of the Fonz

was the most sought-after toy. There was prized possession among my friends. There was this thing like a lever on his back and he flicks his thumbs up like, hey, you know. And I always wanted one. I never had one at the time until I bought one in a jumble sale about 10 years ago. And it's fine.

It's in working order. But it doesn't have any shoes or boots. Oh, no. I just want to put a shout out, right? If any listeners to Chart Music Podcast have a spare pair of boots for a Fonz action figure, just message me up on Twitter or something. I'd love to hear from you. If this was Swap Shop, Simon, what would you offer?

if this was Swap Shop Simon what would you offer I've actually got a duplicate Planet of the Apes action figure I've got two of them so I'll swap you a Planet of the Apes action figure for a pair of Fonz shoes how about that that's a very good deal sir

they're winning on that I think fossilised tree root 10cm so if you're listening and you do have a pair of the Fonz They're winning on that, I think. Fossilised tree root. Right. 10 centimetres. So, if you're listening and you do have a pair of the Fonza shoes, bear in mind they're very little Fonza shoes, please get in touch with us via Facebook or Twitter. All right then, Pop Crazy Youngsters, it's time to go way back to January of 1982.

Don't forget, we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget, they've been on Top of the Pops more than we have. Okay, 1982, and Top of the Pops, under new producer Michael Hurl, is regenerating. They've just introduced a new theme tune, Yellow Pearl by Phil Linnett. They've already expanded the chart out to the top 30,

and they've broken it up into three. They've knobbed off Legs & Co and brought in Zoo, and they've weighed down the studio with paper hats, flags, and balloons. Simon, Yellow Pearl, where does that stand in your mind in the canon of Top of the Pops theme tunes? It's got this weird kind of racist, sinophobic lyric going on. I don't know what it is. Phil Lynott there he's

he's he's obviously got some kind of bizarre Cold War paranoia creeping in that makes him think that I mean yellow pearl is only a sort of couple of vowel shifts away from yellow peril isn't it yes and you know that's that's really what's what's going on here it's's a fantastic record, but, yeah, all I'm saying is, check out the lyrics. They're quite eyebrow-raising. So your host for this week is Dave Lee Travis. Oh, good.

Yes, hurrah. We've already covered him in Chart Music number two. Yeah, but let's cover him again. Yes, fuck it, yes, with a fucking blanket. He's currently doing the late morning slot on radio one just after simon bates just before paul burnett in august of this year he'd be moving to burnett slot and then he'd be moved to weekends in 1983 these are the waning years of of the the hairy cornflake his beard has threads of gray and little shadows come about his eyes time can but make it

easier to be one he's not really the hairy cornflake anymore he's more the kind of like the the hairy breakfast brunch bar isn't he yeah he turns up on this he's got uh he's trying to be smooth he's got a double-breasted gray suit open neck shirt wine colored handkerchief yes breast pocket it's not like the old sort of uh yeah sort of stripy t-shirt dlt when no when all the wild summer was in his gaze he's um he's he and he's his hair and beard arrangement has become perfectly circular yes like a novelty troll door knocker now what it's like what it's like it's like if you're living in a house share with a bunch of people and um you have to pluck the mixed pubic hairs and hair out of the plug hole from several different

people with different colored hair and it comes out in this kind of disc it's kind of this kind of poivre cell disc, with just a little hole in the middle. That's what Dave Lee Travis looks like at this point. If gollywogs were white, they would be Dave Lee Travis. Either that or a wreath. He looks like a wreath. He looks like a wreath to lay at a memorial to shitheads

who laid down their lives that men could continue to refer to each other as dipsticks and pilchards and grope tits with impunity this isn't what was meant by reithian values no he's on a mission by this point he's he's fully on his mission to bully the public into believing that the whole world is a wedding reception and it's time for his shit speech and if you don't want to hear it what's the fucking matter with you you fucking misery yeah it's horrible he's got don't you think he's got the unmistakable air of the bully yes not just because he's a big man he's very overbearing and when these stories came out of him throwing his weight around with the female staff, it didn't surprise me. No.

The thing is, there's lots of different kinds of bullies. But what they all have in common is that they have nothing to offer. Right. As human beings, they have nothing to offer the world. They have nothing to offer the world. And they're so painfully conscious of that fact at some level that what they do instead is to fill that space with an extroverted physical presence. If they take up as much space and as much attention as possible

and effectively dare people to point out the truth that everyone can see, that by taking up that space, they are at best wasting it and at worst poisoning it. So, yeah, they always come across sort of relaxed. But the desperation is always just beneath the surface. the surface so here dave lee travis has convinced himself that he's a cool guy who's funny and unique and people like him and when you at first glance it's nauseating but if you stare long enough into the abyss that is dlt it's terrifying taylor took the words right out of my mouth like his name was a meatloaf because um even before knowing what we now know about david travis i i always hated him even then um yes his humor uh and you

know taylor's competitor um a shit best man speech which i can't improve on but it it was always bullishly unfunny uh but like almost aggressively unfunny you know and even his voice his voice always sounded gaseous like he'd ingested a can of Pepsi too quickly do you know what I mean? and by this point, 82 he's a fish out of water, he's a man out of time

there were a handful of Radio 1 DJs who were at least a little bit on board with the new wave or the neuromantic movement or whatever you want to call it maybe peter powell a little bit mike reed just about because he was into the jam um yeah and that's that's a push but dlt isn't having it at all is it i mean he he belongs in a permanent 1975 and yes and it makes it even weirder that he's flanked by these audience members who look like they've been plucked straight out of the wag club

but are they audience members though that's a question we'll be pondering later on in the show thursday night that means it's top of the pot clt here with you for quite some time with a lot of great artists we start off with the number which has moved up four places to this week's number four. Will you welcome Dollar! Yeah! Travis in a light grey double-breasted unbuttoned suit and a very open neck shirt is flanked by two women with very poor quality face paint one of which is downtown Julie Brown of MTV fame

she's a member of Zoo and a former disco dancing champion as I believe all of them were in one form or another and they're holding a rectangular compact mirror that looks a bit like an iphone as he introduces mirror mirror by dollar by the way that visual gag this is the level isn't it this is the level at which these people operate that's the strength of their imaginations and their humor and their general wit and yet they built empires empires of of shit purely because other people were too stupid or too polite to stop them or not help them because of the the bully's spurious self-belief and self-confidence which whatever else you can say about it is more constructive

than the realistic uh self-doubt and self-loathing that the rest of us always feel and and to be fair to us would feel even more strongly were we davely traveling and also that it's bad enough having to look at zoo but we see travis dancing don't we when he travis introduces this and then does a little sort of uh a little dance for as long as he thinks the camera's on him and then immediately stops uh but in fact it's still on him and he doesn't realize do you think that's some kind of b move. DLT CCTV. So, formed in London in 1978 by David Van Day and Teresa Bazar,

Dolla were a spin-off from the group Guys and Dolls Who Left Stroke were kicked out of the group when they complained about the musical direction they were taking. That was so David Van Day, that was. While Van Day was intent on a solo career he was persuaded by bizarre who he was in a relationship with at the time to form a duo and

they signed with the french record label carrera they immediately embarked on a run of four top 20 singles in 1979 but their only single of 1980 taking a chance on you stalled at number 62 they announced that they were getting engaged, but later revealed it was a publicity stunt to promote a dud album. However, in 1981, Teresa Bazar approached Trevor Horn, who was making the move from lead singer of the Buggles into a production role and had previously worked with Guys and Dolls, and asked him to produce them on their next album.

The first single from this collaboration, Handheld in Black and White, got them to number 19 in September of 1981, and this song is the follow-up. It's from number 8 to number 4. Now, chaps, before we pile into this, as I know you really want to, I just want to say that the way that certain people

go on about this song, it's as if the fucking record jumps out of the sleeve and makes you your tea, and then performs sexual favours upon you. People rave about this song it's as if the fucking record jumps out of the sleeve and makes you your tea and then performs sexual favors upon you people rave about this song and i can't see it so i'm just going to sit back here and i'm going to let my betters explain to me why this song is so important the first mistake you'll make it is to think of it as a song which it isn't it's not really a a song at all right um it only works if you think of it as a sequence of uh different textures and shifting floors and sudden glows neil said in the last show about i think it was billy preston record the problem

with it was that it was a record made by a musician. Yes. And I know exactly what he means. Well, this is a record made by a producer. And it's a great example of a record made by a producer. And there's no particular reason why records made by producers should so often be better than records made by musicians. But they almost always are. And, yeah, I mean, everything about this record is synthetic um and you have to throw

yourself entirely open to uh that experience well i agree and i'm i think that um trevor horn is a genius um i think horn is to the 80s what t Visconti was to the 70s. And I was actually surprised, Al, that you said that it was Teresa Bazaar who approached him and not the other way around. Because the whole thing to me smacked of, you know, I think we've mentioned before, or maybe I'm imagining this, the whole thing with Niall Rogers and Sister Sledge, that he took them on almost as a kind of bet because they were the record label's biggest flock. Just nobody could have a hit with them. And I just thought it was almost, you know,

because Dollar at this point were a fading act. They'd had a couple of minor hits, but before Trevor Horn got on board, they seemed to be yesterday's man and woman. And I just got the feeling with the whole project that he was using them. The previous, I mean, I agree with you that Mirror Mirror is fairly flimsy. He didn't produce a whole album for them. He just did four singles.

It was a very kind of fleeting relationship. But the previous single that you mentioned, Handheld in Black and White, is just stratospherically great. It's easily Dollar's finest moment. And's one of trevor horn's finest moment it was his calling card at that point um and it's as much a showcase for his skills i would say as two tribes or um owner of a lonely heart and um and it was on the back of working for Dollar that he got the gig to produce The Lexicon of Love for ABC which is one of the defining albums of the 80s so Dollar

at this point are inadvertently changing pop history even though they don't know it by agreeing to be Trevor Horn's ventriloquist dummies pretty much David Van Day is wearing a dinner jacket and a Lady Diana haircut while Therese B van day is wearing a dinner jacket and a lady diana haircut while terese bazaar is wearing french knickers and a bra with a massive pink bow tie around her

waist like an inverse spinal tap stonehenge prop it's all a bit naughty knickers week in the sun isn't it her outfit yeah well the thing is they're trying to suggest a sort of uh sexual chemistry between them but it doesn't quite come off because um uh this alas is not my phrase but if there was a film of these two fucking it would have a u certificate i mean like david van day uh has that unusual combination of narcissism uh has that unusual combination of narcissism sexlessness and obvious sourness just below the surface you don't often see those three things together you'll get two of those things together but not all three and bizarre has this weird quality of being technically attractive but totally sexless even if you use your imagination right even in the sort of depraved male imagination. And you have.

You've tried. Yeah, it doesn't work. I mean, yeah, she's basically wearing black underwear, black stockings, black high heels, loads of makeup, bleach, blonde hair. She's almost totally obscured by obvious signifiers of early 80s sex. But she could walk off that stage

and go and take a class at primary school and no one would bat an eyelid. It's really weird i mean i think the bow tie is is supposed to um denote that all here she is all wrapped up as a late christmas present yeah like a show dog or a or a chocolate egg yes but the effect it gives off is all you know the the cocktail dress she was supposed to be wearing didn't arrive in time so just stick this bow tie on no one will notice well there's a weird bit halfway through where they hug each other right they don't embrace or clinch or anything that adults might do they hug each other like each were each other's elderly parent. It's creepy. And it gives us sort of, it's like a sort of Babes in the Wood or, you know,

Lost Children in fucking Narnia. It's like a sort of... It's like that moment where Donald Trump took Theresa May's hand. Yes. It is really odd. It's, yeah, it's not just, it's not just that it's non-adult it's like it's

anti-adult it's there's something decidedly creepy about it and when david van day does that you know there's that bit where it goes only in my mirror and it's it's obviously not him because even if you dropped his voice electronically two octaves he wouldn't be able to do that some force would prevent that from happening so i'm i'm kind of um i'm kind of fascinated by david van day's presence in this episode and this year because to me he's such a 70s heartthrob to look at yes you know he's he's who somehow survived into the 80s he looks like a kind of hybrid of David Cassidy and Luke Skywalker. He's a looking man, not a smash hits man, isn't he? He's barely changed his hairdo since being in Guys and Dolls.

Apart from dying it blonde, of course. I don't think Teresa Bizarre's changed that much. They're both very 70s people. And this is what fascinates me about the whole project of them with Trevor Horn because at this point Dollar are an old fashioned turn but with

modern sounding records you know but you know what though I've got to say even before Trevor Horn got on board they had done some decent forward looking stuff I prefer their radically minimalist version of I Want to Hold Your Hand to the Beatles version. Oh, Simon!

That one wasn't... Guys, calm yourselves. That one wasn't Trevor Horn. That was Christopher Neill, who'd also produced Dancing in the City by Marshall Haynes, which is one of the greatest records ever made. And I Could Be So Good For You by Dennis Waterman, which is not.

David Van Day, right, because I live in Brighton. David Van Day used to come in my local pub. Oh. But, yeah. But I haven't seen him for a while. I sat on a table with David Van Day once. Jesus. The 2000 World Pole Dancing Championships.

A mate of mine, maxim had got uh got invited and we're sat at a table and all of a sudden this bloke comes along and just says is anyone sitting here and i looked up and it was david van day and i just nodded and then he summoned his mate over and his mate sat down it was pat sharp and i i'd love to tell you stories about how i argued with david van day about bucks fears and all that kind of stuff but i just i just looked at my pine because i thought if i actually say one word to this bloke i'm gonna laugh so hard i'm gonna blow a snot bubble that the montgolfier brothers could have travelled across Paris in. I just couldn't do it. And I just thought, I was just waiting for Brian

Tilsley to turn up as well for the fucking blonde hair hat trick. But he's not a well-loved man in Brighton. Get away. You don't say. Which probably isn't surprising as he's self-evidently a terrible human being. But

in 2007, he tried to become a conservative councillor yes but failed to get elected after making homophobic remarks this was in kemp town right kemp town which for those who don't know is brighton's gay village yeah smart move mate yeah well also no you know it's not like david van day's ever done anything camp is it but that's always the way look at donna summer yeah true yeah was this before or after he that would be uh after he became the parasitoid wasp of buck's fizz right laying his laying his evil eggs in the paralyzed corpse and draining draining off the remains of its life force. We have to talk about this documentary.

There's no way we can't. So, yeah, Trouble at the Top. When was that? It was kind of like early last decade. Yeah, early 2000s. Taylor, just give us a brief synopsis about this amazing fucking documentary. It's about one of the great rock rifts of all time

between Bobby G and David Van Day when Bobby G trying to keep Bucks Fizz alive hires in David Van Day as a replacement for poor Mike Nolan and it all goes horribly

wrong as he doesn't realise he's inviting the wolf into his den. He does come off as the world's biggest cock, doesn't he, David Van Day? But David Van Day, he's a reality TV slag, isn't he? He's done them all. I mean, didn't he finish with his girlfriend on the Matthew Wright show? Yes. Like live on air. Yes. I mean, I've got to say, I on the Matthew Wright show? Yes. Like, live on air.

Yes. I mean, I've got to say, I've got no interest in watching all this stuff. Life's too short. But my favourite Dolla TV thing is actually not them at all, but it's the piss take on Three of a Kind by Tracy Ullman and David Copperfield sing a soppy song by Dolla, which actually uncannily nailed something that taylor just mentioned that whole dynamic of this saccharine sweet seemingly perfect couple who actually kind

of loathe they loathed each other behind the colgate grins which if you go look and there are some great interviews with theresa bazaar where she just completely slags them off you know makes him seem like the most vile human being thing is ultimately you you both are wrong to think that this is a flimsy record that's what i'm saying i think this is a this is a fascinating and uh thrilling record now that might just be because i i had it on an album called hits hits hits when i was a kid uh there's a compilation album which also featured the song Loud Music in Cars by Billy Bremner, which

was quite confusing to me at the time. But, no, it's all the thought and expertise that's gone into this record. I mean, it almost makes you bitter to think that this is what prog rock

could have been right the dollar are the band that yes could have been right i mean the i just think it works brilliantly and the fact that people laughed at them for being too commercial which suggests that um they were sort of easy to please or copying something currently popular which when you look at them i don't think that's true there's a sort of hallucinatory quality to all this it's really weird it's someone's strange idea of what commercial is but it's not taken from the world of business it's taken straight from the imagination and uh i mean and the fact that these two vacuous preening ghosts are singing a song about narcissism and are called Dollar,

it does walk the line of maybe being too showily clever. But I think it works because it's like the conceptual equivalent of a power chord. It's so obvious and direct um i think it works really well i i agree with you about the production obviously it is masterful but if we're going to look at the four songs that um trevor horn did with dollar you've got mirror mirror give me back my heart um video tech oh god yeah and yeah yeah and handheld in black and white seriously what order we putting them in i'm gonna go handheld in black and white mirror mirror

video tech and give me back my heart yeah i'd say that as well i've got this at the top i got give me back my heart at the bottom because i I think that is what people accuse Dollar of being. I've got no time for that record. But yeah, I think... Yeah, that whole la, la, la thing on the backing vocals. Yeah. That sounds like air freshener. Yeah, it's a bit much, isn't it?

Yeah. But no, I think this and Videotech are genuinely great singles. What it sounds like, you know those chocolate rabbits you can get by, is it Gillan or something it's it's it's like overdosing on a box of them in it like give me give me back my heart i'm talking about not mirror mirror particularly yeah but i mean as as far as the actual performance goes we see we already see a division between zoo uh the dance troupe and the punters the zoo are behind the act waving their compacts which is quite a premonition

of what musicians have to put up with nowadays just loads of people waving phones at them or whatever the one that stuck out for me was the woman dressed up as a metallic clown as a Doctor Who fan this makes depressing

viewing because it's a reminder of what that programme was about to look like the woman dressed up as a metallic clown. See, as a Doctor Who fan, this makes depressing viewing because it's a reminder of what that programme was about to look like for the rest of the 80s. So, the following week, Mirror Mirror dropped down seven places to number 11. It would move up to number eight the following week, but no further. What happened there to make that song drop down seven places?

It's probably a January thing, isn't it? You get this kind of like weird stasis for a couple of weeks in the chart yeah well i noticed that when they do the rundown uh the snowmen are still in the lower reaches of the chart i think on the previous one of these that i wasn't on uh you were talking about something that's always troubled me as well the phenomenon of people going out and buying Christmas records in late January. It's that, I mean, of all the patterns that you can find in record buying, that's the one that disturbs me the most. Because, I mean, is it like when people buy Christmas cards in February and then put them in a drawer?

Yes, for next year. Because they're only cheap, because I'll save it for next year. Yeah. The follow-up, Give Me Back My Heart, got to number four in April of this year. a draw because they're only cheap because I'll save it for next year yeah the follow up give me back my heart got to number four in April of this year but the working relationship grew tempestuous and they split up in early

1983 only to reform a few years later and score a number seven hit in February of 1988 with Ola Moore they fell out again later that year but they reformed in 2002 for the ITV show Reborn in the USA again in 2008 for the living TV show Pop Goes

the Band. But when Van Day appeared in I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here Teresa Bazar announced that she would never work with him again. David Van Day was last heard of in 2015 when the Daily Mail reported that he and his current partner were making appearances in care

homes in Southend. Did you not see that? There's a great clip on YouTube of him getting quite pompous about this and say actually we're bringing joy to some very unfortunate people. Despite the fact that if you've ever seen the

photos of this, that doesn't look like that's what they're doing, but never mind. Haven't they suffered enough? Yeah, they've gone from 80s night to people in their 80s nights. But he's basically turned into a foppish John Shuckleworth. People who are in care homes now would have, like when this episode was shown, they would have been middle-aged people just sitting there tutting,

thinking, what's this bollocks? And now it's come out to fucking haunt them in their twilight years. Well, the thing is, in this clip, he's being interviewed with his current, I assume it's his current girlfriend, but who he performs with. And at one point, she makes the point that they don't do dollar songs. They do, like, old tunes, you know. And she says, oh, yeah, we don't do this because these people wouldn't really know them.

And he just flashes her just the filthiest look you've ever seen. I think the fur would fly after the cameras had gone. It would, man. If my non-o was in a care room and I knew that was happening, I'd say, go on, ask for making your mind up.

There you go. That's the goal of the show and more on that. Well, I've made no secret on my radio program that I adore the next song. I also happen to adore the singer as well,

so may I present the lovely Elkie Brooks and Fool, if you think it's over. I'm free again Who could love DLT with a girl in fuchsia and some bloke in a territorial army camouflage rig out reminds us that he bangs on all the time on his radio show about the following artist and her latest song, Fall If You Think It's Over by Elkie Brooks. Born in Lane Bookbinder in Salford, Elkie Brooks started singing at the age of 13 and released her first single in 1964. She toured America as a backing singer for the Animals, opened for the Beatles in their Christmas show and worked in Cabaret. In 1971 she formed vinegar joe with

husband pete gage and robert palmer and went solo in 1974 when they split up she scored two top 10 hits in 1977 with pearls a singer and sunshine after the rain but her last top 40 action before now was in december of 1978 with don't Cry Out Loud. This single, a cover of the 1978 Chris Rea song, is currently not in the charts. And Taylor, once again, we have the curse of the top of the pops of this era. Loads of

chattering while Elkie's trying to be a bit sultry in sand-coloured joffers and white blouse. Yeah, you can see this kid in a French Foreign Legion hat. Yes. And also, blouse yeah you can see this kid in a french foreign legion hat yes and also um we see again my third law that if the dj on top of the pops makes a point of saying how good the next song is uh yes and how much they like it it's going to be something that kids don't like although it's weird example of that we had an example of that recently in another episode

it was Simon Bates Simon Bates making a point that this is really good this is quality yes I can't remember I have no use for the past okay

get off this fucking podcast then it's weird just seeing a knot being introduced by Ronnie Corbett in a gold jacket yes I think the first time I actually even heard the name Elkie Brooks was on the Two Ronnies,

when they were doing one of their songs that they do together, some kind of marching song, when they're on about going to some fabulous showbiz party and they're listing all the people who are there. And Ronnie Corbett goes, there was Elkie Brooks with all her looks. And they blatantly only put her in there because Brooks rhymes with looks and looks rhymes with whatever else was coming

next because I thought and golf crooks wasn't well known there and I just thought you know who is Elkie Brooks which I think is a fair question if you're 14 at the time so people had hard lives in those days didn't they because if you look at

in this clip um i mean i i don't want to be some kind of you know revolting uh male chauvinist pig judging women on their appearance but because it applies to men too we've said similar things about alvin stardust but um she she was 36 when this was broadcast which is the same age that beyonce is now right but travis is on home turf, isn't he? Yes, he is, yes. This is divorcee. He thinks he's got a chance. He does, doesn't he?

Yeah. But this is divorcee pop, which is an interesting genre in itself. Fall if you think it's happening, DLT. My memory of this song is that the woman in the house next door um to me um bought this record and played it one day 20 times in a row oh no i mean i've just given given the content of the song i thought she's having some kind of breakdown here you know um if it was the modern day somebody

would have said to her you okay hun you know seriously playing fool if you think it's over by elkie brooks 20 times in a row it was really quite unsettling i mean i was yeah jesus christ i just don't know what was going on through those through those walls um so uh yeah it's the way that travis kind of asserts ownership i mean what he actually says word for word i make no secret on my radio shows that i adore the next song. I also happen to adore the singer too. And he says it through gritted teeth with this kind of hint of menace. Like, you know, if you disagree with me, I'm going to fill you in.

Apparently, there was a later performance on Top of the Pops of this song by Elkie Brooks where someone turned up backstage to get her autograph and she sussed out that it was Chris Rea, Incognito. Wow. Which is really bizarre. Why would Chris Rea in 1982 have to go Incognito? Well, the point being that he'd written the song

that she's singing and he was, I don't know, it's really odd anyway. Yeah, it's all right though i think yeah that's fair enough yeah i think it's a good song i mean i wouldn't i wouldn't have liked it at the time no um i yeah but it's not it wouldn't it's not for you that's the thing yeah it's just just melodically it's got this beautiful logic to it that every bit follows every other bit in in this it's almost like like back or something like that the way that um it's almost mathematically structured it's also got a kind of Nashville um feeling to it I think and the lyrics um just the line newborn eyes always cry with pain at the first look at the morning sun that's almost a

Richie Edwards Manic Street Preachers lyric it really is that's precisely what I thought when I heard it as well it's a line out of Faster, isn't it? It's almost exactly the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I also quite like the drum pattern in this, which, if I'm not mistaken, is basically one of the presets on a cheap Casio keyboard. Is it now?

Do you remember those ones? They're about the width of a modern laptop. Yes. They were cheap enough that you could get them for a birthday present. Yeah. Those Casios. I think the preset, one of the preset rhythms,

there's about eight or nine preset rhythms, was basically this. Do you mean the ones that were left out in WH Smith and kids would just press a button and it would go... Exactly. A bit like...

Trio. You know, Da Da Da by Trio. One of those ones. And the quiz round in 3, 2, 1. But the actual performance, I mean, because of the chattering, because of the disinterest by the crowd.

Note that there's no zoo action here. They've not even bothered. They've not even bothered. So the overall effect to me is it's like your English teacher doing a bit of a turn at Christmas assembly and singing a song and the kids lose interest very quickly. I quite like her image.

Because, I mean, this is parent work. It's like a posh school run in 1982. No, what she looks like is Sarah Jane Smith after half a bottle of gin post-divorce. Like no one could match up to the doctor. But it's good.'s um there's something to be said for this kind of thing because it's yeah also it's the music for uh of people lost in time because it's yeah i mean 36 years old at a point in history when that was already quite

deep into your long old age yeah i mean like women of 36 now are doing pills and booking holidays in Estonia at this point you were sort of written off into a mellow birds or alcoholic tragedy but she suits the song really well

someone who's kind of like been around for a bit and offering sage advice the meaning of the song, it's essentially she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, isn't it? Yeah, I think it works. Also, because there's, I mean, for women at this time, there was no fantasy eternal adolescence.

No. I mean, she's younger than the Stones. Yeah, well, she's significantly younger than the Rolling Stones were at this point. Yes. But, you know, she can significantly younger than the Rolling Stones were at this point. Yes. But, you know, she can't carry on like that. No. But I think it's really good.

Oh, by the way, I saw a thing recently. Because, you know, she still performs now, Elkie Brooks. She lost all her money. Yeah. Because she didn't keep an eye on business. And her manager and her accountant were shit. And she ended up living in a tour bus. But she didn't keep an eye on business. And her manager and her accountant were shit. And she ended up living in a tour bus. But she still performs.

And a few weeks ago, her drummer that she'd been working with for 30 years disappeared before a gig. He didn't turn up. And it said in the news story that she hadn't heard from him since. Now, she seemed really angry about it. She said, you know, he's really let me down and stuff. Well, I was thinking, this bloke is obviously over 50, and he's a fucking drummer, right? And he's disappeared without trace.

I'd be more concerned than angry. It's like saying, you know, I live next to the M1, and my cat's gone missing. What a selfish cunt. Yes. Well, this is why she needs a Casio with the presets on it, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

The other thing that's always fascinated me about Elke Brooks is that she's got different sized nostrils. Right. And I wonder if that is a legacy of having been in Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer in the 70s. Yeah. is a legacy of having been in Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer in the 70s a band once described by Clive James as looking like an angry

armpit which is on the money really she was also a special favourite of Mike Dickin the late bellicose right wing talk sport presenter of the late 90s and early 2000s.

Elkie Brooks was his favourite singer. I know Simon is with us. As lifelong insomniacs, we would sometimes have Mike's Daily Mail informed opinions, soundtracking our non-slip. So the following week, Fool, if you think it's over, enter the charts at number 57 and we'll get to number 17 in February.

The follow-up, Our Love, failed to make the top 40 and her last major hit appeared in January of 1987 when no more The Fool got to number five. She was also reborn in the USA as well. But she kept a distance from the spat between David Van Day and Sonia. He was a right cunt, David Van Day was. A lovely, lovely song and a great singer.

Right, the highest new entry in the... There's a foreigner beyond. The highest new entry in the charts this week is number 13, and it's that amazing rocker himself, Shakin' Stevens and Old Julie! Yay! Oh, oh, Julie If you love me truly Do you want me, Julie Travis is backed by someone in a rat-like costume

as he introduces the next act and he refers to that rat-like costume person as a foreigner. Well, hang on a minute, yeah. Because it's not a rat-like suit because it becomes clear in the link afterwards that it's someone in a gorilla suit and he's now that's a different person in a gorilla suit yes i looked at this long and hard have you it's a different yeah there's two of them it's a there's two of them yes the terrible thing is though might be dollar this this foreigner actually looks a lot like Dave Lee Travis. Yes!

It's this hideous, hirsute vizard. But either way, rat or gorilla, what could he possibly be getting at? What does this tell us about Dave Lee Travis's kind of political sympathies at the time? And his view on matters like immigration? Well, he worked in Germany for a very long time didn't he on beat club yeah harassing whatever her name is the female presenter yeah who is visibly not happy with no being manhandled all the time by her wacky english co-host so shaking stevens born in cardiff in 1948 1948 Michael Barrett was a milkman an occasional pub singer in 1967 when he joined the backbeat and changed his name to shaking Stevens and the band's name to the Sunsets they supported the

Rolling Stones in 1969 played benefits for the young Communist League dedicated their first LP to Karl Marx and sold badges at gigs that read, Shaking Stevens and the Sunsets, Heterosexual Rock and Roll. In 1977, he was spotted by the pop impresario Jack Good, who invited him to audition for his West End musical about Elvis, and he appeared as the King in his prime alongside PJ Probert. This led to appearances on the revived ITV rock and roll show Oh Boy and an inevitable solo career. His debut single Hot Dog made it to number 24 in March of 1980. He's already scored two number ones with This Old House and Green Door and this single is the follow-up to it's raining which got to number 10 in october of 1981

it's also the first single written by shaky himself and it's the highest new entry this week at number 13 i mean i've i've got i've i've got a bit of a personal interest in this i suppose because uh well being welsh being from cardiff and um i i kind of know shaky I've met him a few times and my dad knew him and stuff right I I like him um he's he's a he's an unusual man though he's um he's he's a man he's a man of few words he's quite but a lot of shakes a lot of a lot of moves a lot of shakes um I I love the fact that he has his whole backstory about being a communist in the 60s and 70s. There's a place in my hometown of Barry called, it was the Railwaymen's Club, but it's now like some kind of disco for young people, as it should be. But in the 70s, Shaking Stevens and the Sunsets would regularly play there, sort of raising money for the union, which is cool.

Yeah, with their heterosexual rock and roll with it yeah and i do want one of those badges so if anyone out there has got that i'll swap you maybe um a doll of the fonz with boots for a heterosexual rock and roll badge um and i'll wear that badge on my manic street preacher's top that says all rock and roll is homosexual and let the two of them fight it out it's like that you know um you know the comedian stephen wright he had he had this line that goes uh for my birthday i was given a humidifier and a dehumidifier i just locked them in the room and let them fight it out so i'm imagining a similar thing um he's a bit of a loner he's a you know he's a loner is shaky so it's kind of

surprising that he's ever in a band if you look at him in this performance it's kind of jarring that he doesn't have a backing band because the music is kind of very busy up tempo kind of cajun zydeco kind of sound going on uh but there's nobody there playing it it's just him uh very exposed on the stage, doing his shapes. Yeah, but he commands that stage, doesn't he? Yeah. With his hips and his legs and whatnot. His whole thing of having white shoes, that was quite daring, I think, at the time. Yeah, that was a look.

Which, you know, would later be taken up by people like The Strokes and Noel Fielding or whatever. But at the time, Shakey was on his own. like the Strokes and Noel Fielding or whatever. But at the time, Shakey was on his own. Did you know, by the way, that he did a gig at ULU, University of London Union, in October 1976, where he was supported by The Clash? Really?

This is amazing, right? Fucking hell. One of The Clash, it's like The Clash's fifth or sixth gig or something like that was supporting Shakey and Stevens at ULU. And it was full of teds, obviously, as you'd expect. And one of them menacingly went up to mick jones and gave him five pence and said that's your fair home mate and um the clash then had to barricade themselves in their dressing room door because angry ted's wanted to beat him up um different times but um shaky was 33 when when this was broadcast. And I kind of wonder, I think, you know,

because he's a good-looking man in those days. And I wonder if he appealed equally to 12-year-old girls and sort of 37-year-old mums. I really don't know. But this isn't anywhere near his best. No. I put his best singles would probably be Give Me Your Heart Tonight,

which I like the kind of bossing over thing there. The cover version he did of It's Raining. And Marie Marie, his second single. That's banging. Absolutely banging. But I've got not much time for this at all, to be honest with you. It is hard to dislike Comrade Shakey.

Yes. Because there's no swindle. Do you know what I mean? There's no swindle here. know i mean there's no swindle here all he says is hello do you want to see me do a weak elvis impression and sing a 50s pastiche and then he does it and it's like you know those clowns at the seaside where you put tempi in and they cackle horrifically but that's all that they said it was going to do so it doesn't matter um he's all right the thing i don't like most

about this record is the accordion yeah i know it's supposed to sound cajun and everything but it doesn't really come across there's no it's a bit italian restaurant isn't it yeah well there's no accordion on any 50s rock and roll record so no puts your mind to the majesty of french rock um she's not what anyone needs. No, it's not directly French. It's Louisiana French, isn't it? So, it's people like Rockin' Dopsy and stuff like that is what he's trying to be like. Yeah, I can't hear it, though.

I can't hear it. Partly because… It was that woman who sang Don't Mess With My Tutu. Yes. Oh, Denise LaSalle, yeah. Yeah, Denise LaSalle. It's all that kind of stuff, yeah. It doesn't come across to me partly because the way the record is produced,

which is a big mush, right? Like it's the 80s. There's actually a semi-decent 50s-style guitar solo in the break, but you can't hear it because it's buried in the depths. And it's like they didn't realise that what makes those, like, Scottie Moore guitar solos sound so great is that they're loud and they leap out of the speakers at you.

They're not buried under a fucking accordion. Yeah. But, you know, he's all right. He's all right. He wrote this, didn't he? Yeah, he did, yeah. It's like if you spend your whole life singing 1950s songs,

sooner or later you realise how piss-easier it is to write a mediocre one although barry manilow covered it so i would imagine yeah i would imagine you made a bit out yes but it it's strange his faulty hologram of elvis it's like uh it's like if elvis had been drained and autoclaved um basically it's like if elvis had worked on a chair a plane in rill and it's you know that's just a roustabout yeah it's you know it's that's there's worse things hey taylor you might remember this do you remember when shaking stevens was a brit pop landlord oh this rings a bell this does ring ring a bell. I can't remember

the detail. Right, there was a block of Maisonettes in Camden, just off York Way, where Kanicky, the band, lived for a while, and so did Menswear. And Menswear had been there for, I don't know, probably, they'd been

there for just coming up to a month, and they get the knock on the door for the landlord collecting the rent they open the door it's fucking shaking steven standing there yeah he had invested some of his uh some of his oh julie millions in in uh in property in camden town a fair play and this this this then led sorry this then led to this uh ongoing joke because directly opposite uh Sainsbury's on Camden Road, there was a little late night convenience store called Green Door.

We were all convinced that that was Shakey's as well, but we never found out what was going on behind the door. I mean, presumably an old piano being played hot. Yes. So he'd come to look at this old house that he owned yay exactly it was getting shaker yeah you imagine like menswear complaining like these these uh shingles

need fixing yes but alas and of course we get we do get the pleasure of seeing the actual julie don't we uh which is someone by Zoo who looks like someone shaky and have absolutely no interest in whatsoever. But almost certainly was called Julie. He'd been watched closely from the audience by that bloke in the army jacket, like the Fox, and a black guy

dressed as an RAF cop. You know, if I was watching Top of the Pops with my dad, which is what I did round about this time time just to see his reaction to people like Boy George and Mark Holman he'd cheer up a bit and his knee'd start going and he'd go oh this is fucking proper music

this is and like talking of proper music Shakey has now gone full circle in his most recent album it's his kind of rootsy country rock album about his family history so you know he's yeah he's gone he's left the kind of uh elvis impersonations behind and doing a johnny cash impersonation i guess yeah it's called coal dust on my white shoes yes

so the following week oh julie soared up to number 3 and would be number 1 the week after that for one week the follow up Shirley would get to number 6 in May of 1982 and he'd have 3 more top 20's in 1982 I can't remember that song

it was probably the same thing he probably thought oh I'm onto something here doing songs about girls yeah Marie yeah oh oh Shirley won't you be my girly perhaps

oh oh Trace why don't you come and chase me let's get a little bit racy Shakin' Stevens would spend more weeks in the top 40 over the 80s

than any other band or artist he dominated the 80s with his totally yeah with his white shoes he was never off Top of the Pops no he only watched or artist he dominated the 80s with his totally yeah we've never off top of the pops you know he watched the early top of the pops he's on it every fucking week yeah about three years and if it's not him it's some other rockabilly rivalists like matchbox or the pole cats i suspect there were uh producers or production team members of a certain age now we're very proud of that stat in wales basically shake shaky and bonnie were to the 80s what tom and shirley were to the 60s

Right, Shaky Stevens, well done, kid. Number 13 in the charts. We now have a competition for the BBC cameraman. See who can keep Claire in focus. Number 7 in the charts, it's Alton Images. Yeah! Travis is flanked by a woman with crimped hair and a spiky dog collar on one side and someone in a gorilla costume on the other. He sticks his hand into one of their mouths.

Fortunately, it was the gorilla. Don't you think that that woman is dressed like a female adamant right i think that's what she's going she's aiming for it yeah it's basically eve and yes and he introduces i could be happy by altered images formed in glasgow in 1979 altered images sent off a demo tape to suzy and the banshees and then found themselves supporting them in 1980 and becoming a regular fixture on the john peel show their first two singles failed to chart but their third happy birthday got to number two in october of 1981 held off the top spot for three weeks by it's my party by dave stewart and barbara gaskin and every little thing she does is magic by the police oh what a different world it would have been

this is the follow up single and it's up this week from number 10 to number 7 and of course DLT says you know the cameraman's got to follow Claire around I don't know if that was on his personal command

or something for later on yeah let's step away from that one. Altered Images, seen as the band to watch in 1982. And they're kind of like living up to that two weeks into this year. Yeah, it's weird with Altered Images, because if you listen to their very early stuff, it's quite kind of spiky post-punk. Yeah, dead pop stars.

They were Suzie and the Banshees uh ripoffs weren't they yeah but yeah but um but ripping off specifically one suzy and the banshees song hong kong garden just that which is a good one to rip off yeah this is another producer led record uh even though you don't necessarily think of it that way in fact i think the producer might even have been the bloke from suzy and the banshees but um if i was no no i can tell you um i can tell you it's produced by martin russians who produced there now that makes an awful lot of sense yes yeah yeah because it's got that brightness to it and i think that that's what you see happening when music shifts from 81 to 82 you see the monochrome shifting into color in a big way in 1982 that's what's going on and just taking martin russians and dare and the human league as as the example

of this um in about 12 months the human league went from sound of the crowd to mirror man mirror man being the you know a very 1982 record and sound of the Crowd, a very 1981 record. So, um, Altered Images, they kind of had a foothold in, uh, in 81, but 82 is where they're at home because it's all about the primary colours. I actually prefer the next single, um,

See Those Eyes, but that, this is something that I always find myself doing on these podcasts is complaining that we've got the wrong song, you know. Like, no, no, it's a song before another song after is better um but um i you know i i did i felt quite fondly towards all of the images i didn't like this song very much um but i like her from particularly from the film gregory's girl which i really liked at the time yeah but again i mentioned earlier on the piss take of dollar by tracy ullman on three of a kind you know i know where this is going i i was wrong about not the

nine o'clock news uh having finished by this point because of course pamela stevenson does the happy crappy nappy song yes um so yes which is actually it's you know it's it's it's route one it's easy comedy but she fucking nailed it it was spot on because at this time and and even now claire grogan seen as the wee jimmy cranky of new pop but this is a dark tune isn't it well yeah i mean it's all about being stalked and trying trying to wriggle out of a you know a relationship you don't want to be in um there's that been that story in the news recently about the guy playing a piano for hours and hours on that green in Bath because his girlfriend won't come back to him.

This is almost like the other side of that story. Yeah, he got lumped though, which was heartening news. By Claire Grogan. Yes, yes. Who then went to climb high in a tree. and swim a mile down the Nile. Yes. See, I do love this record, but I'm not much of a Claire Grogan fan. I can understand why at the time it would have seemed radical

or at least refreshing, but decades down the line, it's a little bit much. I mean, she doesn't come across as stage school by virtue of no near total incompetence as a singer and performer but mixed with this sort of um cheerful awareness of that uh but it is a bit trying for the same reasons um and i totally understand why at the time this was seen as preferable to being cool or trying to be cool um yeah but ultimately what you're looking at here is a female freddie garrity so you know you either you either did that or you don't but it is a good

record it is a good record you basically just just ruined the kind of adolescent fantasies of a whole generation of men yes oh sorry but it's the thing is that it is a great record because um it's all handled so well in the production like her remarkably bad singing um is beautifully produced like he's coached her to not hold any note for longer than a split second and then buried and echoed the whole thing in a way where it doesn't sound offensive even though none of it is in tune um this record is a mini miracle what it also does is simultaneously accentuate and cover up for the sloppiness of the group and that becomes the selling point so you hear it and this record is uh refreshing because it doesn't sound slick but at the same time it does sound slick because of how it's presented so yeah yeah martin russian brings this this real kind of crispness and this real

brightness to the guitars basically russian does does for the guitars on this what he did for the synths on something like love action by the human league it's got that yeah sunshine quality to it um yeah although you know i i actually preferred altered images um the single from their third album don't talk to me about love it's a bit kind of disco that was a fantastic record yeah but as for this actual performance i mean claire grogan she kind of she dances like a mad auntie um dancing at a baby in a wedding do and the the kens of the band are that they've all been togged out by burtons apart from the drummer who looks a bit goth and a bit confused because he's

kind of like why am i drumming so fast what's going on the drummer looks like he sells speed but he he doesn't look like he uses it at least uh not not today the thing about this the band is that um you can always tell when these bands have got a bit of money put behind them because they turn up with these expensive classic guitars, like these 1960s Gretches and stuff. It's always a telltale sign of an indie band that's got a bit of a cash infusion.

Also, just get a telecaster because after playing one of those things it's like getting out of a transit van and into a sports car just saying and we actually get two whole seconds uh of the audience there's a lot of white frilly blouses and uh ski jumpers which were uh definitely on trend in January of 1982, and probably the first appearance of the wedge haircut as well. Yeah, I think 82 is probably the year that Neuromantic broke, you know? I think it's the year that it actually caught on in the rest of the country. Throughout 81, and a bit of 80, people were watching Visage and Duran Duran or whatever on top of the pops, but they didn't know where to get those clothes

on their local high street. By 82, you can buy that stuff on your high street. Avanti at C&A, Simon. Yeah. By this point in 82, your local hairdresser can give you a kind of Princess Di haircut and can give you kind of Marco Pironco peroni type threads as we're going to see in another performance that's like i remember in the late 80s me trying to dress 60s uh and it was a bit of a problem because there weren't any good charity shops where i lived and you'd go into like

a high street shop like mr by right or whatever and you you're looking for i was looking for like a you know like the original Breton shirt, right? To try and look like Brian Jones or something. And they did sell, they did sell. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's.

It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating wendy's until may 5th terms and conditions apply white shirts with the blue hoops but you couldn't find one that didn't have a pocket on the breast with a wheel of a ship on it it's not it's not the same no the thing with this record is is it's actually quite influential. I think Altered Images are quite an influential band. That whole kind of sound of Young Scotland, even though they weren't on Postcard Records, were they?

No. I don't think they were. You had all these bands like Orange Juice and Joseph K, maybe the Blue Bells. There's a lot of this kind of jangly stuff coming out of Scotland. And I think maybe it's because Scotland sat out punk I'm struggling to name um uh an important Scottish punk band can anyone think of one I can't think of of a Scottish it's like it's like Scotland watched punk happening I thought okay just like we watched

the world quite funny going on 1974 and 78 yeah yeah I think it was a risky place to dress as a punk in 1977 but you know by this point you've got aztec camera uh and yeah all those other bands i mentioned maybe a bit later on lloyd cole and the commotions all that kind of chiming big guitars big jangly guitars um which i think led directly and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing is you know dilute to personal taste but c86 and that kind of cutie pop, bands like The Primitives and Primal Scream and so on wouldn't have happened without this generation of, you know, quite flimsy but quite kind of upbeat Scottish jangly bands.

So the following week, I Could Be Happy dropped back down to number 10. Fucking hell, this is a bad episode of Top of the Pops for that. The follow-ups, See Those Eyes, got to number 11 in April of this year, and they made the top 10 one more time with Don't Talk To Me About Love in April of 1983, and split up later that year. I'm gonna be gay for you As old as images, number 7 in the chart And now one of the most unusual numbers

New in at 25, The Stranglers and Golden Brown Formed in Guildford in 1974 The Stranglers played the pub circuit of the mid-70s and were dragged into the burgeoning punk scene when they supported Patti Smith and the Ramones, but were always seen as a bit too old and proficient by the music press. Nevertheless, they had a run of five top 20 hits in late 1977 to mid-1978 before a series of diminishing returns set in this is their 15th single release and the second cut from the 1981 lp la folie it's a follow-up to let me introduce you to the family which only made it to number 42 but golden brown has been made single of the week by radio 2

and it's a new entry at number 25 it's hard to say anything much about this record because it's a new entry at number 25. It's hard to say anything much about this record because it's good, but in such a dry and dislikable and disagreeable way. It's like something beautiful that's being delivered like an expectoration. You know, it's really charmless and flat. But once you get past that, it's a good record. But why do you want to go past that?

I love this song. I thought it was brilliant then and I that it's a good record but why do you want to go past that you know i love this song i thought it was brilliant then i think it's brilliant now a lot of its appeal does come from the contrast of course between the record and them like their image and what they're like i mean they are an authentically unsavory bunch of human beings right the stragglers just to look at um like if you look at it, Hugh Cornwell, you wouldn't accept a lift from this man. The worst one is Dave Greenfield,

the keyboard player, one of the most inappropriately named men in pop because he doesn't look like he's seen a Greenfield in his life. If you look at him in this clip... Yeah, he should be called Jet Black and Jet Black should be called Dave Greenfield. Don't you think? You see him playing the harpsichord in this clip yeah he should be called he should be called jet black and jet black should be called dave greenfield don't you think they just play in the harpsichord in this clip and he looks like one of those 15th century monks that boiled and ate 400 children it's horrible you put him in a purple robe and a silver crucifix that he in an amicus film perfectly

but it's what's so weird is that they still felt the need, because this is just what they look like. They can't help it. This is what they are. And yet they decided to push this sort of less than salubrious image and give themselves a name like the Stranglers. And it's like when Katy Perry did that, which put fireworks on her tits.

It's like you didn't really need to do that because it's not as if nobody was looking at them already it's they could have been called you know they could have themselves the twitchy nosed hamsters and dressed like giles brandreth yeah they still would have been irredeemably seated yeah i mean yeah you're right it's almost redundant to talk about the stranglers being nasty pieces of work because that was the whole deal redundant to talk about the Stranglers being nasty pieces of work because that was the whole deal. We can talk about David Van Day being a nasty piece of work.

There's mileage in that because he was pretending to be something else. The Stranglers were just, you know, yeah, that's it. What you see is what you get. And, you know, if anything, they were sort of playing it up for sort of, you know, to look cool, all these kind of stories about locking journalists in the boot of the car and look cool all these kind of stories about knocking journalists in the boot of the car and dumping them in the middle of spain and all i think their greatest service to mankind is providing us with a litmus test for the soul because there are people on

earth who say they prefer the stranglers version of walk on by like unaware that they're standing on a trap door and my finger is on the fucking but i mean i knew about the stranglers for like years before this i mean my mate andrew burr got a copy of something better change in around about 78 778 and we would nip out of junior school on the dinner hour just to play it and mime to it for about five times in a row. Well, you mime to it, but by standing totally still and scowling.

That's what teenagers do, basically. Set the Stranglers about 35. It was more kind of like jumping on the settee, because that's what we thought the Stranglers did. I bought Duchess, I like Duchess that was a good song

so this song was quite a shock when it came out because it was a bit more tuneful and a bit more, a bit mellow if you will I associate it with the older kids at school you know, sort of sixth formers who probably would prefer

prog to anything kind of new wave. So, and this song, because it had an unusual time signature, you know, it was difficult, therefore it must be good. If something's difficult to play, that is quality. Yes. But yeah, are we going to, I mean, the elephant in the room is the whole drug thing, right? Yes. I mean, supposedly it the room is is the whole the whole drug thing right yes I mean supposedly it's about heroin is that right

and I hate that apparently so I hate songs that are really about drugs if you're if you're tuned into it you know

I fucking hate I hate that whole thing I really really dislike that whole thing with Perfect Day by Lou Reed and even the Jesus and Mary chain Some Candy Talking like oh another girl another planet oh fucking i i really dislike it

i just like that kind of tap tap on the side of the nose thing of oh of course you know you know what they're really singing about don't you oh fuck it perfect day is about having a lovely day in the park and this this is about i don't fucking know their favorite color of curtains yeah yeah just come out with it if they've done this song and they call it drugs on mint yeah never a frown because drugs are meant well i say good for them because as far as i'm concerned the nice thing about heroin is that it's a way for other people to be happy without me feeling resentful of them which is something of a win-win as far as i'm concerned quite rare for you as well yeah so when did you find out that this was a drug song because i can remember at the exact moment my dad my dad storming in from

the pub one night and saying hey you're not listening to that fucking Golden Brown, are you? Because it's about fucking drugs. And I just went, oh, is it now? Oh, I'll look into this. What, had it been in the papers or something? Well, someone at the pub probably told him. Oh, right. You know, my dad, he got all his information from what someone in the pub had told him.

Yeah. So, yeah. Because, of course, at our school, it's 1982, it's still glue you know glues the thing yeah and you know used to have all these adverts about heroin and we'd be like well how'd you get hold of that then well that's it yeah when morrissey was singing uh and the queen is dead i swear to god i swear i never even knew what drugs in that weird yodel um i didn't know what drugs either at that point um i'm not going to do that noise anymore. No.

Yeah, so when the Stranglers, you know, the fact that the Stranglers might have been, they could have been singing about fucking anything, I didn't know what heroin meant. But just as an adult now, I don't like that kind of misdirection and that kind of deception that's going on of trying to sneak a naughty drug song past the censors

no one's told Zoo because they provide interpretive dance to this which suggests they've interpreted this song rather as a moth interprets Urdu poetry by flying into a lit window

over and over again and they are all dressed as Marco Peroni. Four of them. Men and women dressed as Marco Peroni. Oh, yeah, Eve Ann is in there. She's one of the zoo members dancing to this song. Yeah. Well, there we go.

Yeah, and don't the band look glad for this bit of help? It's what they would have looked like anyway. Have they ever looked glad for anything, ever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But by this point, the zoo are really kind of like stamping their authority on this episode, aren't they? There's too much dancing in this episode.

I will come on to this in a minute. There's way too much dancing. But anyway, yeah, yeah, let's say that. Zoo are stamping on this episode. So the following week, Golden Brown jumped up to number 16 and would spend two weeks at number two behind a town called malice by the jam the follow up la folie would only get to number 47 but strange little girl a tune they demoed in 1974

made it to number seven in august of this year of course gold golden brown had a kind of second life um about six or seven years ago uh during the the brief reign of our um last but one prime minister um yes but it didn't quite people kept singing never a frown with gordon brown but yeah it didn't quite work because he did frown a lot but what you did get with gordon brown was this really disturbing sex face between sentences when he pauses for breath. And he was on heroin. And he was on heroin. I'm kind of, in the video for Gordon Brown,

as well as looking as generally kind of disreputable as he already does, Hugh Cornwell is really sweaty. He's got this kind of horrible, clammy-looking sweat on his upper lip. And now, in my mind's eye, I'm kind of combining that with the kind of slack mouth of gordon brown when when he's either on the vinegar strokes or he's pausing for breath in the middle of a speech thank you simon this is maybe the moment that in smash hits they go

i don't know yes before i go any further with it right everybody you might remember the national youth team disco championships a little while ago here's the winning mob from Princess Park dancing to Cool and the Gang. Woo! Travis speculates that we can recall the results of the National Youth Team Disco Dancing Championships.

Oh, it was a blinding one, wasn't it? Do you remember? Oh, yeah. And introduces a troupe called Princess Park, or they're from Princess Park or something like that. He says they're from Princess Park. So I'm going to refer to them as Princess Park, which is going to be a bit confusing because that's the name of the team

that Hot Shot Hamish is in, in Roy the Rovers. pot which is going to be a bit confusing because that's the name of um the the team that uh hot shot hamish is in in uh in in roy the rovers and he tells us that they're going to dance to get down on it by cool and the gang formed in new jersey in 1964 as the jazzy acts and then cool and the flames cool and the gang were a funk band who went a bit disco in the late 70s when James Taylor joined as lead singer. And they made their chart debut in late 1979 with Ladies Night which got to number 9. This is their 7th top

10 hit and the follow up to Steppin' Out which got to number 12 in May of 1980. And it's up from number 7 to number 3. What do we talk about because here we've got a dance routine, but we've also got the video of the song as well. That video, that weird effect, that kind of stuttering effect.

Isn't it the most unwatchable video ever? It's really weird, yeah. It's the same effect as in Bohemian Rhapsody, and also there's a Jackson's video. Can you feel it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, leaving trails trails but on this they really have just pushed it up to 10 it's like kids when they get like an effects box and i just put

it on 10 wow it's amazing yeah it's actually a screensaver it's like a screensaver we have one of those things that gradually covers every bit of the screen and then starts again well it's essentially like watching a video on YouTube through your fucking Commodore 64 isn't it it's just fuck I do wonder if the BBC engineers received this video and just sent it back and said

yeah you've sent us a duff copy it's unwatchable yeah I mean that probably explains why they've cut it 50 50 with this dance troupe but it does it does give you an authentic lsd feel uh this video looks like the 1990 glastonbury festival look to me which is a sweet memory but intercut with these disco champions to sort of bring you back down to earth you know yeah upstaged as they are by a doctor who extra high

kicking in the background the bbc have obviously gone well we can't show this because people think the the fucking crispy pancakes for the tea has been laced with drugs i i don't think they're very good i mean i'm sure no they're not they're rubbish aren't they they they're doing kind of leapfrogs and and kung fu roundhouse kicks and then they're very literally getting down on it getting down on the floor

in a manner that Flick Colby would have would have approved of you know so I mean if these guys won I don't want to think about who came second

yeah who was who came second fucking hell fucking Davros also it's the kind of dancing where everyone else in the disco has to get out of the way

which is yeah which can always and eternally get fucked because who needs it you know no and it's a bit obvious to make them dance to this as well right what they should have done is uh made them dance to shaking stevens and say like it or lump it because a good dancer can adapt yes and shaky could like buckle his legs to get out of the way of their rat house kidshouse kids you know there's no way they're bringing him down i mean we're talking about 1982 so by the by this time you know there's

there's kids in america whoa particularly new york who uh are kind of you know busting some other kind of moves and i look at this this troop and i just think you're not you wouldn't last very long on the street i'm sorry i'm obsessed now with the idea of shaking Stevens having a fight with him. With four of them coming at him, and he's just like... He's quite hard, actually, shaky. I can imagine. I mean, we've seen what he did to Richard Madeley.

He shakes, but he doesn't break. Now, the thing with Cool McGann, right, is that they went on a journey from being this real badass funk band to being yes the the wettest most kind of radio 2 friendly uh nominally funk disco act in the world i think i hated them around this time this song's actually all right this song's all right but i think this song's but i'm talking about stuff like um joanna? Yeah, Cherish is one of my least favourite records of the 80s. It's horrible. I fucking hate it.

There's something sort of offensively benign about them. And when you compare that to, I mean, of course, nowadays because of Pulp Fiction, everybody knows Jungle Boogie. Yeah. And in Britain at this point, we all knew Ladies' Night, which is a bit of a fucking tune. That's brilliant, Ladies' Night. Yes, it is. But to go from that to being what they became in about at this point, we all knew Ladies' Night, which is a bit of a fucking tune. That's brilliant, Ladies' Night. Yes, it is.

But to go from that to being what they became in about 82, 83, it's pretty sad. But this song is all right. This song's still got a bit of the DNA of their earlier incarnation, I think. It's a great song, ruined by shit video and a shit dance routine. It's very smooth, but it's one of those early 80s disco funk records. And I mean this as a compliment. They barely seem to exist as music.

It's like you're almost unaware of it happening. You just sense a change in the atmosphere and a lovely opiated glow and this sudden compulsion to dance. It's like a particular kind of perfection of the form. But when you listen to it, there's so much going on in the record to create that effect. It's like most smooth rides. There's flippers working overtime under the water.

I think it's great. But from here, there's two directions you can travel with this kind of music, either into abstraction or into minimalism and if i have a problem with what happened with this kind of music in the 80s it didn't really go far enough in either direction and just wimped out so the following week get down on it drop one place to number four the follow-up take my heart you can have it if you want it would get to number 29 in March of this year. But they'd have 10 more top 40 hits throughout the 80s,

including Joanna and Cherish, which got to number two and number four, respectively. Tell me, baby, how you gonna do it if you really won't take the pill? Hey, hey, hey, come on, you guys. Well done. Superstop. There you go.

Now, listen, yours is the Team Disco Championship from 1981, amateur, right? Yeah. Well done. I'm sure you're going to go on to great professional things eventually, but we have a professional group for you now, and all I have to do is ask you, who is your favourite professional dance group?

Zoo! Zoo! He says the right things with the four tops. Here they group. Zoo! Zoo! He says the right things with the four tops. Here they come. Zoo! Woo! Travis points out that the dancers from Princess Park are amateurs and basically menaces one of them into saying that Zoo is his favourite professional troupe. Oh, and we're going to see just how professional they are as they dance to Don't Walk Away by the Four Tops. Formed in Detroit in 1953, the Four Tops signed to Motown in 1963 to record jazz standards for the company's workshop label,

but were then invited to sing over an instrumental track which became Baby I Need Your Lovin' and they never looked back. After leaving Motown in 1972 when the label moved to Los Angeles, they had a stint on ABC Dunhill Records and then disappeared for much of the late 70s. However, they signed to Casablanca Records in 1981 and immediately scored a number three hit in November of 1981 with When She Was My Girl. This is a follow-up to that and their 26th top 40 hit in the UK and it's up this week from number 26 to number 23. On my notes here, I've got the four tops being danced to by the two bottoms

this is where zoo get really gets pushed in our face yeah there's just way too much dancing on the show i mean what the fuck is going on what you know is it an anomaly or is this just the direction they're trying to take the show in at this point well i mean this is the really weird thing is we're right smack into the dawn of the video age i mean you know everybody now has got used to um promo videos so bbc have obviously spoiled for choice but they've gone no no people don't want to see the bands they want to see dancers and this is you know this is a year or so before fame remember i was wondering about fame whether that was an influence. But no, the chronology is wrong. But I'll tell you what was around was Jane Fonda's workout videos.

Yes. And just aerobics. Aerobics was a kind of buzzword at this time. We're still a year and a bit away from breakfast time with Diana Moran, the Green Goddess. But it's kind of hinting towards that. And Mad Lizzy. And Mad Lizzy as well. So we're kind of hinting towards that mad lizzie as well so uh we're kind of hinting towards that aren't we but yeah i think aerobics and jogging were were in the air at this

time like keep fit was becoming a thing yes and yeah leg warmers and and uh and lycra was kind of the order of the day but it's just it doesn't lend itself to uh well it certainly doesn't lend itself to the four tops jesus christ no god no one of the greatest bands of all time you know one of my favorite bands of all time i don't like you guys i i just totally totally love the four tops um levi stubbs i think is one of the greatest soul singers who ever lived um i was i was lucky enough to see them when they were still the four tops just about when none of them had died yet, in the mid-90s, Wembley,

as part of some kind of Motown review. I don't like this song very much. I think when she was my girl was better. I even think Loco in fucking Acapulco might have been better. But it doesn't matter. You can't really begrudge the Four Tops having this little kind of Indian summer

to their career, can you? Well, this is just exactly like one of their their old records but with 80s drums and bass like as if like everyone listened to motown records and said it's all right but we should change the rhythm section make it sound a bit more 80s although it this does just edge it over uh what's it called back to school again which is their contribution to the soundtrack of Grease 2 this year. Right. Oh, dear. But, yeah, it is an insult to have Zoo dancing to them.

And I hate what Zoo look like. I hate the way they dance. I hate the fact that when you look at who was in Zoo, they're not content to be dancers, right? There's too many fucking singers and TV presenters and Hills Angels it's like they've got who's in there there's downtown Julie Brown

Haywood the singer was a member of Zoo there's the mysteriously named Void that probably explains why they're so sloppy as dancers which they really are when you look at it, as well as looking like they were thrown off an 80s porn set for being too tastelessly dressed.

They look like they were drawn by preschoolers with crayons. You know what I mean? Yeah. You're right. They're probably just thinking of the next step in their career. Yeah. Yes. And, you know, no pun intended.

But, yeah, they're totally looking at some kind of TV presenting gig, aren't they? Absolutely. And I hate the way that they're clustered around Travis on all the links, like they're the Uber audience, right? Yes. Instead of this embarrassing,

thrown-together gaggle of leaden hoofers. And they don't need those fucking leg warmers. They must be sweating cobs like leaping around like that under the lights they're dressed entirely in man-made fibers yeah it's not good isn't it but but zoo are essentially now the the audience aren't there and you do wonder that why didn't the bbc carry this on why didn't they have more glamorous attractive people in i don't, the 9 o'clock news? They could have gone to picket lines and stuff like that.

Yeah, but you're right, it's a bit kind of pre-selected. It's a bit like in a John Waters film, Hairspray, the Corny Collins show, where the audience all have to be attractive and all the pretty girls gathering around the presenter, who, God help us, in this case, is Dave Lee fucking Travis. Yeah, well, maybe they needed professional Dave Lee Travis bystanders who had to sign a contract.

Yeah, because no member of the public would do it voluntarily. Also, what I hate about them is that this is the 80s that the posh pseudo-Bohemian twats in East London are trying to bring back. You know, where you've run out of ideas for clothes, right? You haven't got any new ideas for what to wear. So you just find all the stuff that people previously avoided, you know, for good reason. Like clashing colours and mullets and so and it's an extension of their fundamentally vapid but overbearing uh worldview like they're fundamentally soulless and empty-headed people

but they're born to rule and they're fizzing over with entitlement so they have to drag everyone else down to their level so they can still feel like leaders I fucking hate it I can't stand it and as we know after doing you know 10 other of these is that a lot of the fun in looking at an old top of the pops is looking at the audience you know either being in awe of standing next to someone famous or chatting someone up or just

dancing like a mentalist and we don't get that in this episode they've been shunted off to the side. There is an element of the audience, which are the kids, but you hardly see them. And that's just fucking wrong, isn't it? Yeah, you can tell who are the kids because they're the ones in the shit paper party hats

that have been distributed. Yes, yes, yes. And as for the dance routine, it's by looking at this, and we take the piss out of it every fucking episode we do, but you look at Zoo and you just go, God, I really miss the storytelling ability of Legs & Co and Pants People. Yeah, I don't think we've necessarily given enough props

to Pants People and Legs & Co in previous episodes. No, I think we're going to look at them with fresh eyes now, aren't we? I do feel guilty now for all the times we're taking the piss out of them i mean i know that's what we're here for but you know yeah they probably with about two days notice every week they came up with something that was at least mildly entertaining and something to do with the record or the song unlike unlike these twats who are just sort of leaping around and kind of notice me notice me kind of way, aren't they? Yeah, they're people who failed the audition for Hot Gossip.

Yeah, or the Hot Shoe Show. Oh, God. And, you know, you just look at it and you think, well, look, you've got two blokes, you've got two girls. Obviously, the two girls can be walking away and the two blokes can be imploring them to not walk away yeah playing the piano for for six weeks in a park in bristol yeah and taylor's absolutely right because the winner's always right history and if you go if you go into um

a fancy dress shop like partido now and yes and pick a thing off the shelf that says, crazy 80s look. This is what it'll be. You can get it for like £5.99 now. Which nobody in real life wore in the 80s. No, but this has become solidified now, and ossified, and this is the 80s to a lot of people. Well, it's like in the early 90s,

when there'd be 70s nights and all the blokes would dress up like Jason King. Yeah, stop getting the past wrong. So the following week, Don't Walk Away nudged up to number 19 and would get as far as number 16. However, the follow-up, Tonight I'm Gonna Love You All Over,

only got to number 43 and they left Casablanca and returned to Motown in 1983. Hey, thank our fucking lucky stars that Dave Lee Travis wasn't introducing to number 43 and they left Casablanca and returned to Motown in 1983. Hey, thank our fucking lucky stars that Dave Lee Travis wasn't introducing Tonight I'm Gonna Love You All Over. Yeah. Yes. Jesus, imagine. Sorry, sorry, I'll continue.

No, no, no. After walking out on Motown in 1986, they signed to Arista and had one more top ten hit in 1988 with Loco in Acapulco. Wait, wait, wait, you haven't mentioned the key fact here, the key four tops stroke top of the pops fact, which is that top of the pops saved the lives of the four tops. Oh yeah. They were

booked, they were booked onto the plane that exploded over Lockerbie. Yes. And the reason they weren't on the plane is because they were delayed filming Top of the Pops so they missed it yeah because John Lydon was supposed to be on that plane as well wasn't it it's a shame Zoo weren't booked on it no I shouldn't I've heard loads of stories about I mean I've heard that story about Lockerbie as well and the other story the other rock related

story about Lockerbie that I've heard is that there was a consignment of Pretenders tour jackets on the plane. And when they were going through the wreckage, they found all these kind of silky tour jackets with the Pretenders on the back. And the band didn't want them. Nobody wanted to buy them. So they ended up giving them out to the homeless. No. they ended up giving them out to the homeless so presumably in southern Scotland for much of that year there were homeless people walking around with the Pretenders 1988 tour

written across their backs I mean that could be complete bullshit but it's a story I heard and the other thing I want to say and get in about this zoo routine is Levi Stubbs tears run down his face

number 30 new entry for mobiles, Drowning in Berlin. At 29, Wild is the Wind from David Bowie. The Snowmen are still doing the Hokey-cokey down at 28 this week. And another new entry at 27 is Christopher Cross with Arthur's Bean. At 26, up goes Meatloaf and Dead Ringer for Love.

And another new entry at 25, the Stranglers with Golden Brown. Up to 24, go Chaz and Dave with Stars Over 45. And the Four Tops, Don't Walk Away, up to 23. A jump of three places for our theme tune, Yellow Pearl. Phillip Lynott at 22. And at 21 down go The Tweets with Birdie Song. And up to number 20 this week, here's Brown Sauce and I Wanna Be a Winner.

Don't wanna dance like Chris L. Sauce and I want to be a winner. Formed at BBC TV, Wood Lane, London, W12, 8QTT in 1978 Brown Sauce were a band formed by presenters of the Saturday Morning Kids show The Multicoloured Swap Shop namely Noel Edmonds Maggie Philbin and Keith Chegwin distinct absence there John Craven why didn't he get involved because he's got some sense

he's got some fucking dignity he was doing a solo career or something at the time this song written by b.a robertson was recorded as a one-off and took advantage of the post christmas lull to become a surprise hit it's up from number 31 to number 20 well this fruit is hanging so low it's scraping off the ground but But fuck it, let's gorge, right? Okay, first thing I want to say is, did you notice that DLT's distinct lack of enthusiasm in presenting this?

He actually made them take out the line, don't want to lead a farm workers union like Cesar Chavez or sicken millions like Dave Lee Travis. Wait, he ended up late working on that one? Yeah, I must admit I did think of that before we sat down. But you think DLT's probably shitting himself here thinking please don't get any higher in the charts than Convoy UK by Laurie Lingo and the Dim Sticks,

which got into the top 10 in, I believe, 1977 or something like that. That sounds about right. So the obvious question here, because we are gentlemen of a certain age, were you a Swap Shop kid or a Tiz Was kid? Swap Shop when my mum was around, Tiz Was when she wasn't. Actually, that's not even true. I was probably just naturally a Swap Shop kid and a Blue Peter kid. That's just how I roll.

I'm very very bbc i really am swap shop started at an earlier hour than tis was on a saturday morning tis was didn't come on until i don't know i don't remember but swap shop started bright and early so i'd usually watch the first bit of swap shop then as soon as tis was was on i'd turn over as would most of britain i think yeah my heart lay with Tiswas obviously because you know I remember I swear Dan I remember watching that as early as 1974

1975 or something like that but like most people if they actually look within their hearts and actually have a memory you'd flick from channel to channel wouldn't you? Have I told you my story about how the phantom flan flinger is a taxi driver in brighton right i'm sitting back and listening this is so fucking

brilliant um right apparently let's get one thing out of the way there's more than one phantom flan flinger okay yes there is there's there's one guy who's perhaps the the iconic phantom if you will the sort of tom baker of the role But there are lots of other kind of lesser Phantom Flanflangers. Pretty much if you turned up to the studio and the regular guy wasn't around, you could have a go at being the Phantom Flanflanger. So, yeah, I had a taxi ride across Brighton a few years ago. This guy picked me up quite a few times, actually, and he'd always tell me stories. He was a plugger for EMI Records based in the Midlands

and working things like Kate Bush records and stuff like that. And he'd often find himself in a Tiswas studio accompanying some band or other. And one time, the main Phantom Flanflinger guy wasn't there, so he just got to put on the costume. I think he did it about seven or eight times. Wow. That is so awesome to me, never mind he did about seven or eight times. Wow. That,

that is so awesome to me. Nevermind the fact that he was, you know, mates with Kate Bush. Being a fucking phantom, the actual phantom flam flinger. Yeah. Mind blown,

I tell you. Well, funny you say that, Simon, because I know another phantom flam flinger. Ah, well there you go. And he runs a Northern Soul night at the pub at the bottom of my street.

Does he throw flans at people? Taylor, do you know any phantom flan flingers? No, but I once got drunk with the Tango Man from the Tango advert. He slapped people in the face. That was me. Big, big bold bloke, yeah. He was alright, you know.

Anyway, brown sauce. Yes. Fucking hell, yes. At the age of nine, it seemed perfectly logical that someone would write a song like this because if you live in this time period and your main news source is john craven this is your world right this is your entire world um and even now i can identify with this song because penny keith don't need me at the manor and I have no desire to marry Diana

then or now and I've been nationwide with Frank Boff and once was quite enough I can tell you and it's I really liked this at the time you know this really appealed to me it's

I can't like it now just because it was written by b.a robertson who i hate so much you know what and the first time we've mentioned him on chart music that's ridiculous isn't it a man whose face you'd only ever be pleased to see if you'd mislaid the tin opener you see right i really like the comedian Rob Brydon. I think he's really talented and really brilliant. I see where this is going. Yeah, it kind of makes me think, it puts me off him slightly,

that he looks a lot like B.A. Robertson. B.A. Robertson is totally wrong. He's just such a wrong-un. We've all seen that clip, presumably, of him with Annabella Lewin. He's interviewing her for some show or other. And he's just a complete sexist pig to her. And she, quite rightly, just, you know, takes him down several pegs.

Didn't she storm off? I think she storms off. I don't know. Yes, she did, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But no, he's horrible. The one thing, pop can be frivolous. It can be serious.

It can be all kinds of things. It should never be smug. And B.A. Robertson was smug. With so little to be smug about. Yeah. I mean, you know, once you've had the idea to write a song like this, right, that's just a laundry list of light entertainment and new celebrities of 1981, really. Yeah.

At least fucking do it properly, right right you can't even see it through the line that pisses me off with this i know i know yeah go on he says don't want to ride like willie carson be a bishop or an important parson not only is that a horrible pun um which he's got a history of, B.A. Robertson. Someone I know had one of his albums and it had a song on it called England's Green and Pheasant Land. That's fucking hell. But this line from the song also, it slightly aggravates my mild OCD because it doesn't have a person named in it. No, but it shows you a picture of the Pope. It shows you a photo of the Pope who is an important

parson, even though it's the wrong religion. Actually, because Catholics don't have parsons today. How hard would it be? Are there Catholic parsons? How hard would it be to... Yeah, Nicholas Parsons, yeah. He was known. Oh, yeah, Nicholas Parsons. Yeah. Or, don't want to ride like...

Yeah, he wasn't on the BBC. Oh, yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? Because it is a big advert for the BBC, isn't it, this? I'll tell you what, this completely threw me. When you came out with that lyric, I was sure you were going to go with this one. The one that rhymes President Regan with Kevin Keegan. Oh, God, don't get me started. Jesus Christ. Don't get me started on that.

I mean, like, I know he's only been in office about a year at this point, but surely everybody knew how he pronounced his name. He was quite well known. Yeah. But I was talking about this song on Facebook recently, because what I said was, if someone asked me who was famous in 1981 slash 1982, I would play them this song,

and then I would apologize for playing this um but it it is for all its uh horrors it's the most succinct snapshot of of who were the most famous people in britain or the world at that point um well it doesn't mention peter saltcliffe true but that they're mostly people. You could have added, I've no desire to bully like Gripper or kill 13 women like the Yorkshire Ripper. Oh, fuck it. See, already that's better than B.A. Robertson.

Go on. Don't want to shoot the Pope. Mehmet Ali Agkar does that. I'd like to see him try it with a blue pick. This is the fucking Nadir of my life, isn't it? I thought I was going to be the next Joan Didion. Fucking making up excess verses for I want to be a winner. It's actually brilliant.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. I thought of this earlier. I got it, right? Don't want to ride like Willie Carson. Play chess like William Hartston. Perfect. I say it now. Perfect perfect but this song is basically this is where the seeds form in Noel's mind

about cosmic ordering isn't it you know I want to be successful but I don't want to do anything to deserve it if you were forced to be in a band with Noel Edmonds you would definitely want him to be the drummer just so that he'd be behind you all the time and you wouldn't have to look at him yeah in his in his rock star costume it's specs and a rugby

yes i i find it interesting it sort of in what it inadvertently says about celebrity because the people that it lists are famous in a way that people are not famous anymore because they all have that kind of universal generation transcending fame that's pretty much gone. Some of the other names, Claire Francis, Hurricane Higgins. Oh, by the way, I met Claire Francis last year walking her dogs in Ride on the Isle of Wight. Just want to show that in there. Cool, go ahead.

Boycott, Muhammad Ali, Barbarabara woodhouse yes yeah and yeah princess diana but yeah obviously people of that magnitude like diana you know there are still sort of people who are mega stars like that but it's that next rung down people who are kind of variety stars who are famous for young and old is is something that really does not exist anymore i think that that's something that's's quite poignant about this song. No, you can't use that word about this fucking awful song. But you know what I'm saying. Yeah, and sportsmen who are famous who weren't footballers.

That's something that's got to be. Yeah. God, yeah. Because of Olympics, but apart from that. But listening to you list those names there, it's quite terrible how many of the people mentioned in this song did not prosper, right? There's Diana, Muhammad Ali, Harrikin Higgins, Frank Boff.

I think it's time to start talking seriously about the curse of brown sauce, in fact. Yes, definitely, yeah. Even the members of the band. Keith Chegwin descended into alcoholism. Got his cock out on the telly. Maggie Philbin married Keith Chegwin and Noel Edmonds went mad.

Yeah. Yeah, Noel Edmonds continues being Noel Edmonds. Yeah. And the other thing that really fucked me off about this video was they sang Just a little Oscar please and Maggie Philbin's brandishing the world's biggest Oscar that she probably got from Athena or something like

that and you just thought that's completely out of proportion I mean if you had a little teeny tiny Oscar that would work with a song but no speaking of which have you ever seen Noel Edmonds his hands is this a film or no no if you ever see a picture seen Noel Edmonds' hands? Is this a film or...? No, no. If you ever see a picture of Noel Edmonds holding something,

it's like someone's tried to force a marrow into the hand of an action man. Oh, by the way, here's another fucking brag. Anybody here touched an Eric? No. Well, I have. The Eric, of course, was the awards that Swap Shop gave out every year, named after one of, I think it was their floor manager, Eric, who was a very kind of Mrs. Manor-ing person.

You never saw who he was. I did an interview with Tony Hart about three or so years before he died, and I'm in his studio, and's got an Eric. You might want to rephrase that. Yes. Yeah, but he won an Eric and also next to it was the original Morph in a glass case like Lenin.

It'd be so amazing if you went to Tony Hart's house and said, right, I don't show this to many people, but I'm going to show you the original Morph and you walk in the room and it's just a ball of plasticine scrunched up. What do what you expect that's what he does you know yeah he reconstitutes the other thing i like about this song is the equivalence that it draws between being able to paint like van gogh and going on telly and telling a dog to sit down, or being somehow required by Audrey Forbes Hamilton, like Ned, or Brabinger.

They used to call Brabinger the Van Gogh of Grantley. But also pretending to be Van Gogh, but having a paintbrush behind an ear that shouldn't be there. Oh yeah, because Noel personifies it. Yeah, you see. Just the lack of detail in the research of this video is just appalling. Although, to be honest, the rest of him shouldn't be there either. Do you know, what about when he drums?

That bit in the video where he keeps drumming with his tiny hands on the stick, like drumsticks which in his hands look like baseball bats. Well, look like the ones that bloke out of Mott the Hooper was playing on that episode we talked about. If you're really hip, by the way, you'll say that you prefer the Edmonds-less follow-up when they change their name to the Sources. Yes. Spring has sprung.

Yes. Or the B-side, Major Breakthrough. sprung yes or the b-side uh yeah breakthrough uh but you know you you would be posturing i think if you uh if you tried to make a case you're not going to get a result by name dropping brown sauce are you in any kind of conversation i'll tell you what including this one i'll tell the other curious thing about this video is that um maggie philbin her dress is inside out if you look closely she's got one dress that says new york but it's backwards so she's obviously wearing it right it's like some sort of sex farce like she's in the room like like it's the rhythm section she's been off in a little room with noel edmunds laying down the uh laying

down the backing comes back behind chiggers's back it's like fleetwood mac isn't it you look at this and it's like you look at this and uh this really this video looks for all the world like keith chegwin trying to live his dream and it being ruined by noel edmunds who's clearly treating the whole thing as a big fucking joke. We've got to say John Craven made the right move, didn't he? It's very similar to Shaznay refusing to be in that film with the other members of All Saints.

Very smart, a career move there. Well done, John. So the following week, I Just Want To Be A Winner dropped to number 23. Fucking hell. But then it jumped up to number 15 the next week,

which was its highest position. Edmonds left the band soon after, and Philbin and Chegwin released one more single as The Saucers, Spring Has Sprung, which failed to chart in March of 1982, the month that Swap Shop ended. They didn't get higher than DLT. But they did beat The Bucketeers and The Bucket of Water song.

So, you know, a victory of sorts for Swap Shop there. It's just like an explosion in a paint factory. And here is the chance. And we have a new entry at number 19, Being Boiled, The Human League. The police and spirits in a material world are this week's 18. Down to 17, Wedding Bells from Godley & Cream,

and still in the same position of 16, Duran Duran, My Own Way. But a rock and roll for you at number 15, that's from Status Quo, and at 14, same position of 16, Duran Duran, My Own Way. A bit of rock and roll for you. Number 15, that's from Status Quo, and a 14. Same positions last week, Rod Stewart and Young Terps. The highest to enter this week is Shaken Stephens and Old Julian, 13. Cliff Richard with Daddy's Home drops to this week's number 12. One place up for Waiting for a Girl Like You from Foreigner,

and 11 places up to number 10 for this one from Kraftwerk. Formed in Dusseldorf in 1969, Kraftwerk began as an experimental rock band before going all synthy in 1974. They went on to influence anyone who even went near a synth throughout the late 70s and early 80s, but they first came to prominence in the UK with Autobahn, which got to number 11 in June of 1975. They released Computer Love, the second cut off the new LP Computer World, in July of 1981, but it only got to number 42 in August of that year and it slid out of the charts. However the B-side, the model from the 1978 LP

Man Machine was picked up on by DJs so EMI flipped the order and put it out again in December and it's up this week from number 21 to number 10. That's a bit weird isn't it? Is it? Well the fact that this is a this is a you know a three-year-old song that was on a b-side well i guess so but um it's the sort of thing that used

to happen a lot with soul records and and sometimes it would happen deliberately later on the decade with um last christmas slash everything she wants by wham but that was quite craft quite crafty maybe this is where they got the idea. But Computer Love's not much... I mean, it's all right, Computer Love. I quite like it. But it's not on A-side. So, in a way, it's just DJs correcting a mistake that Kraftwerk have made there

and characteristically making a mistake. Yeah, because I have to say, I do like me Kraftwerk. And out of all the songs that could have been their one number one, why did it have to be this one? I really like i think it's a fantastic record yeah but and i i kind of in retrospect i i view what's happening here in the same way as bowie when he came back with ashes to ashes and fashion and rocks roxy music when he comes back with angel eyes and

same old scene because basically you've got all the new romantic bands ripping off the 70s greats, Roxy, Bowie and Kraftwerk, and you've got the old masters coming back to reap the benefits like, hang on a minute, we're still here. This is now their world. They programmed it.

And yet, my memory is that at the time this was treated almost as a novelty record. Certainly by the media, despite the is that at the time, this was treated almost as a novelty record. Yeah. Certainly by the media, despite the fact that it's obviously the root of about half of what's now in the charts. And I think it was because they were German, because even as late as this, the British sort of treated Europeans

the way that Henry Kelly treated them in Going for Gold. Yes. Do you know what I mean? It's like, you know, Brexit being the final act of this. Yeah, I mean, Germans still meant basically Spike Milligan in a funny Nazi costume and that kind of thing at this point. I mean, Germans were still the enemy in 1982, wasn't it?

I mean, in a couple of months' time, all the action comics would have the Brits bashing Argentinians. But at the minute, Germans are still seen as, you know, the other. But I think, you know, Germans of the 1940s were seen as the other by Germans of the 70s and 80s. And this is why Kraftwerk are what they are. This explains everything about it. I mean, I'm not coming out with a particularly, you know,

groundbreaking theory. This is what everybody says about kraftwerk but it happens to be right and i've actually i'm going to do that thing they do on blue peter where they say here's one we prepared earlier i've got a little bit i've got a little bit that i wrote um in a live review of of kraftwerk and i'm going on about ralph hutter and florian schneider and being born in the years 1946 and 47 and what I'm saying is they were Marshall plan kids who reached maturity at a time when nostalgia for the art and artifacts of their homeland was unconscionable the only way was forward and that's why while the Britain of the early 70s wallowed in in the faces and free and america in credence and skinned west germany gave us kraftwerk this is why for many of us a kraftwerkian eins wei drei vier is is as iconic as a ramonian

one two three four that's and here ended the section of the thing that i wrote but yeah i i think that that's the point that they are they're products of the war in the same way that our attitudes are anti-german attitudes uh of the time we're lingering from the war in the same way that our attitudes are anti-german attitudes uh of the time we're lingering from the war they their radical futurism there's radical cleanliness and futurism of craftworks music is also due to world war ii see in a way the greatest compliment that i can pay this record is when i sat down uh and tried to think about what I could say about it. Not much came to mind, even though I love Kraftwerk so much. But, you see, sometimes it's hard to discuss the classics

because, you know, occasionally you get to puncture a myth or something, but often the stuff you've heard a thousand times is the truth. And the thing about this lot is they're so... But often the stuff you've heard a thousand times is the truth. And the thing about this lot is everything they do is so beautifully formed and aesthetically perfect that it's easy to grasp and not miss anything, which is kind of right because they're designed to be beautiful and functional and beyond chatter. Yeah. So in a way it seems amazing that there's so little to say

about this great record, as opposed to some of the other less-than-great records on this. Yeah, it's always the way, isn't it? But in a way, yeah, it's as it should be, because, you know, when you talk about these old hits, you latch on to the imperfections and the odd angles and the bits that time has gnawed away at whereas this record is pristine and self-contained and uh to reduce it to to words is almost to miss the point which isn't true for most pop music especially not

from this period because it's all about about a sort of a chaos of ideas. It doesn't apply to this. It is what it is. I want to talk a bit about the video or the footage that we see, because I've always wondered with this video, maybe you guys can film in on this, that footage that you see of, you know, black and white footage of fashion models in the olden days,

was that Kraftwerk's own choice to put that there, or is something that the bbc i was wondering that because i was well it's not no i think it's not a bbc definitive now because when you go and see craftwork live um they show that footage but at the time i thought is it like that thing they have of you know wacky footage of trains exploding and people jumping off Worthing Pier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, Grey Whistle Test stuff, yeah. So apparently this was Kraftwerk's own video. But my favourite bits are when you see them and it's just their kind of facial expressions

because they're so non-rock and roll. That's what's so great about them because you've got to remember they're baby boomers. Germany had a post-war baby boom the same as anywhere else. Maybe a slightly more depressive baby boomers germany had a post-war baby boom the same as anywhere else um maybe a slightly more depressive baby boom like um oh no we've lost the war we might as well have sex and have a baby rather than more jubilant sex that british and americans were having or worse ralph and florian were baby boomers but they're not rockers they weren't rock and rollers

and um this is what i love about just their faces um they're sort of they're not hunched in a masturbatory way over their instruments in the way that a rock guitarist would nor are their heads thrown back in sexual ecstasy what it is is diligence they're just looking down carefully and diligently over their machinery and making sure that it's all functioning correctly and there's something absolutely beautiful about that for me yeah and who hasn't done that one night when the pissed up over a stove with a couple of wooden spoon handles well i actually bought one of those ones um which had uh four circles not six um that yeah there's ones that um they used to advertise them in the back of smash hits and it just looked like the sexiest thing in the world these little drum pad things um but i i got how much were they oh fuck no way more than i

could afford but i got one in the 90s for about a fiver a car boot sale all right and it's brilliant and i um when i was djing i used to really annoy the punters by plugging in and go over the top because one of the noises you could get was a kelly marie style style which craftwork had way too much dignity to to use of course yeah so the following week it jumped up to number two then down to number three and then up to number one knocking oh julie off the top spot before being knocked off itself by a town called malice the The follow-up, showroom dummies would only get to number 25. It is weird, isn't it, that the two most

modern-sounding records in this episode, and we're going to come to another one shortly, were from four years previously. Ridiculous. From a time when four years ago was a fucking eon away. Yeah, totally. Right now, the all-important top section of the charts.

Let us see precisely what's happening. Number nine, it must be love from madness. John and Vangelis, I'll Find My Way Home, is up one to number eight this week. A three-place jump for Altered Images, I Could Be Happy at number seven, and down one to six, it's ABBA with One Of Us. Here are the top five.

At number five, and rap, Adam and the Ants, and Dollar with Mirror Mirror have moved up four places to this week's number four. Also up four places to number three, Cool and the Gang, Get Down On It, and down to number two, the Human League with Don't You Want Me. So, here we have the number one sound after five weeks for Human League, it's Bucks Fizz and The Land of Make Believe.

Stars in your eyes, little one, where do you go to dream? To a place we all know The land of made-believe Founded in London in late 1980 in order to perform an entry in the 1981 UK Song for Europe competition Making Your Mind Up Buxfiz went on to beat Liquid Gold to become the UK's representative in that year's Eurovision Song Contest, which it won. This song, written by band creator Andy Hill and

former King Crimson member Peter Sinfield, is their 1981 non-Christmassy Christmas record that has just knocked the human league's Don't You Want Me off the top spot after five weeks, jumping up from number two. Now, first thing I want to chuck out there is this song is supposed to be an anti-Thatcher song. So can anyone explain that to me? It's really about heroin. But you're asking a lot to expect any sort of coherent narrative to a Pete Sinfield lyric. I mean this is a man whose previous lyrics include the sea goat casts aquarium runes

through beads of mirrored tears. Suave pirates words of apricot crawl out of your veneer. I mean it's not really about anything. Something nasty in your gardens

waiting patiently till it can have your heart try to go but it won't let you don't you know it's out to get you it's not exactly ghost town is it but it's not exactly making your mind up either well where's this urban myth come from is it just like fucking Bob Holness playing a sax solo on Baker

Street I honestly don't know. It's been mentioned in interviews and stuff like that, that it's a song about bachelorism. Yeah. It's bizarre. But the performance. Bugsfurs are wearing kind of like matching Chinese pajamas. They're kind of kimonos and cavalier trousers.

It's almost like, you know, those children's books where it's split down the middle and you can flip the pages and you'll have like a guardsman's jacket with a postman's head and you know i don't know yeah so what does the panel think about boxfiz then it's hard to credit that this is a british record in some ways it sounds very sort of benelux or possibly German, just the relentless thump of it and the sort of overcast semi-reggae feel. I was going to say, is it technically a reggae record? I mean, it's not Irie, but, you know, is it a reggae record?

It's on the reggae preset. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. But you can at least see why it's number one, even if you wouldn't have helped to put it there it's a sort of a well turned out commercial

record but I mean fucking hell you watch Dollar and then you watch this and you wonder how anyone could ever have been bamboozled into thinking that Dollar were bland this is like Dollar if Dollar had been produced by alan

shearer it's just a really sort of blunt direct not very thought out pop record it works though it does work in the same way that alan shearer worked um but at the same time these people when you look at bucks fizz they're not human experiments like dollar no and they're not phonies like brown sauce and they're not they're not simulacra like shaky they're just four unremarkable human beings up there doing their best just like they would have done in the hairdressing salons where they belong. There's something really pure about it, I think. Yeah, and everybody likes Cheryl Baker, at least, surely. Yes.

Because she just looks like she'd be a right laugh. Yes. Yeah, but you see, Jay Aston is my secret crush. She's usually, I think, the unsung sex bomb of the early 80s. But it's really not happening. Are you kidding me? It's really not happening are you kidding me? it's not happening in this clip

in this clip she has a sort of weird Jessie J hard facedness about her like she's the new landlady of a pub in south east London you know but you're just left with eggs and baker

and those two bad at football Roy Races. It all falls flat without Jay Aston's usual Tigress presence. About three months after this episode went out, I was on a school exchange in Germany and that's where I came across the magazine Bravo. And yeah, we know where this is going, don't we? Oh, yeah. In more ways than one.

For those of you who don't know, Bravo was pretty much the German equivalent of looking. So there'd be pop features, there'd be telly features and stuff like that. And I got a copy and I was flicking through it and he goes, oh, look, there's Adam Ant. Oh, look, there's David Essex. Oh, look, there's a sex problem page for early teenagers

with actual photos of like 13 year old girls and boys kind of you know getting it on but there was an article about an appearance by Buxfiz on German television where Jay Aston appeared to have forgotten to put her drawers on

and they were doing the spinny round thing in making your mind up. And there was just basically an arse shot. And yeah, that got pulled out of the magazine and it got passed around a playground in Nottingham a few weeks later. And... You still got it?

No, I haven't. I think I swapped it for a Rubik's snake. Although speaking of Germany, we've seen the clip of them from a couple of years after this. No, from about a year after doing If You Can't Stand the Heat on German television in crazy fetish wear. It is brilliant.

And first of all, I've never seen anyone look... The last time I saw anyone look as awkward in pvc fetish wear as cheryl baker i was peering through the a car window in a lay-by in chelmsford but the the jay and mike look like as though they were born to do this right they're very very convincing but the best thing about the clip is that they're performing on a stage with tables around it like a sort of a you know like a dinner club you know before like a cabaret performance and at the table right in front of the stage where bucks is erotically is a young kid and his mum um to living out the uh the the perfect the perfect actions of a young kid and his mum faced with something uh more sexual than what they were prepared for yeah the the mum is

looking very unimpressed while the lad is pretending that he hasn't noticed yes looking in another direction so that afterwards if his mum says anything you can say what i i didn't notice i didn't didn't see yeah there was a there was a pac-man machine over in the corner i was looking at but no that happened to me when i was on holiday in chapel st le Leonard's when I was about 13 or something. And my family would always sit on the front table right near the stage. And there was a dance troupe of young ladies called the Champagne Kittens. And on the last night, they came out dancing to, I can't even remember what they were dancing to, something like Bad Boys or something like that.

And they're all in stockings and suspenders. And they're basically just rolling about on the floor, just from in front of my face. And I kind of like first time they did it, I kind of jumped up and knocked, I knocked a full plate of scampi and chips over on me, ma'am. So I felt,

I felt that boy's pain. I've, I've, I've been there. It is the, the fundamental design flaw in the family unit. Yes. But yeah, but at this moment in time,

they're still, you know, fizzy books fizz. They're not sex fizz yet, are they? Yeah, no. Fucks biz. Yes. They're still living off the vibe from making your mind up. Yeah, and Bobby G g bobby g also has 1970s hair um so yes so you can see why david van day was a logical fit because it's kind of his

mirror image she's seeing there he saw kind of soul brother when he when he saw dave van day you know he just thought that's my kind of guy you know bobby g was uh an ex-builder yes and i was looking at him i think what did he build paper houses an ex-builder in 19th century japan yes it's not yeah you can't see him with a hod can you no no yeah i'll tell you what i do like about this performance though is their synchronized wrist moves yes it's like they're so beautifully well rehearsed it's like if the stylistics were as white as is humanly possible but because it's bucks fiz you watch this and uh it doesn't look like a natural expression of their personalities you just picture them on a drizzly Wednesday morning

in a room one wall of which is a mirror. Yeah, a pineapple dance studio. Yeah, being shouted at by a quite severe lady. With a stick. Yeah, banging it on the floor. You've got big dreams. You've got fame.

There's also a young Jürgen Klopp in the audience. Towards the end. Well spotted, that man. If you look closely. But, yeah, it's not great. It's not the Bucks fizz that I can tolerate. I do quite like the sexy Bucks fizz,

and I like the tragic Bucks fizz. Yes. But this is just, yeah, it's like, it's not, I don't, also I don't like the mugging to camera. There's more fucking mugging in this performance than the Lower East Side in 1979. It's really hard. It's like tiring to watch.

Bugs Fizz are essentially a more attractive brotherhood of men, aren't they, who can dance a bit. Yeah, and an infinitely less attractive and talented ABBA. So the land of make-believe would spend another week at number one before being usurped by the model. The follow-up, My Camera Never Lies, gave them their third and final number one in April of this year and they'd have seven more top 40 hits throughout the 80s.

And then David Van Day came on. That's a lot. We've got the Human League at the end of the program. Thanks very much on behalf of the whole team here at Top of the Box. See you for another one next week.

Take care. Good night. program thanks very much on behalf of the whole team here top of the box see you for another one next week take care good night right had been, the human league. Yeah, all 40 seconds of it. Yeah, but oh, what 40 seconds there were. What I love about it, right, because the song, of course, is this radical vegan manifesto. It's a stern condemnation of the silk trade. So you've got Phil Oakey goingaky going uh and by the way we've already

seen davey travis um surrounded by people with mini flags and balloons which i think is kind of almost a hangover from the royal wedding that happened only a few months ago so there's that kind of party atmosphere so you got phil oaky going listen to the voice of buddha saying stop your sericulture and then someone goes move it yes it's amazing yeah someone does shout move it doesn't they i thought that was a floor manager yeah i thought it was a floor manager as well yeah because it's quite aggressive it doesn't sound like whooping it up it's a bit of a sort of you know get out the way of this fucking crane or i'm gonna be on a charge for decapitating a 12 year old formed in sheffield in 1977 as the future the human league were originally an all-male

synthesizer group who signed with the independent label fast product in 1978 this is the first single they ever released in june of 1978 which failed to chart. After signing to Virgin Records, a re-recorded version of this was put on the Holiday 80 EP, which got to number 56 in May of 1980. After that, half the band spinned off to form Heaven 17. The remaining members got Susan Sully and Joanne Catherall in, and they became one of the biggest bands of 1981, with their latest single Don't You Want Me currently at number two. To capitalise on this,

EMI have re-released the original version of Being Boiled and here it is, a new entry at number 19. This kind of sticks a pin in the balloons, doesn't it, this song? The best thing and the grimmest thing about this clip is Dave Lee Travis, now so alienated from everything that makes up his life that he introduces a record called Being Boiled in exactly the same tone of voice

in which I tell the woman on the checkout that no, I don't have a Tesco club card. Yes! It's unbelievable. And his pathetic little wave of the balloon, like, yeah, party on, lads. He's not having fun here at all, is he? And those disco champions are totally unable to dance to this record,

as I suspect. Yeah, they're rubbish, aren't they? Either that or they're frozen on the spot, experiencing a sudden revelation, Ree, the barbarity of sericulture. Oh, my sexy bedsheets are going straight in a bit. Yeah, while he's unwrapping a flag made of silk. No.

Probably. Yeah. Didn't think that through, did there? It's basically like Top of the Pops doing Meet His Murder and everybody waving chickens about or something. Yeah, that would have been brilliant. Yes, it would have been absolutely brilliant. But, I mean, the thing is about this is that Top of the Pops have decided that pop music something that would have been brilliant yes it would have been absolutely brilliant but i mean

the thing is about this is that top of the pops have decided that pop music on their show is going to be like this you know all wavy and smiley and jumpy up and down there and then all of a sudden they realize that oh shit there's this type of song as well yeah you've got one of the most bleak stern records ever made yeah people waving flags and balloons around but i i love that i love the fact that the human league was so fucking popular at this time off off the back of don't you want me that this could be re-released and get into the top 10 yeah there's there's a lot of that i suppose um the previous year would have been adam and the ants yeah things like. So you had things like Young Parisians and Deutsche Girls.

Car Trouble. Making it into the charts. Car Trouble, yeah. And this was the league's version of that. Yeah. It's a great record, though. It is, isn't it? When you consider the...

All right, I know that Martin Ware these days is an absolute synth boffin, but at this point, they were amateurs. They didn't know what they were doing. Yeah. They were mucking around in a kind of art center in a former kind of meat warehouse or whatever it was in sheffield and they were coming and they come out with something like this it's just a phenomenal uh record yeah really it's it's just it's got this christmas to it it's like it's like a smack in the face it really is particularly uh high high volume and um i don't

think it's dated at all every time um there's some kind of revival of synth music whether it's you know god start of this century electro clash or or more recent initiatives um this record can sit amongst that and still sound modern i think yeah i love the early like pre-fame human league stuff i love the the classic human league stuff too but i love i love their early albums and uh the eye this idea that people like paul weller had that this kind of synth music is somehow inhuman or faceless in fact the sheer material materiality uh of the sound is so overwhelming and kind of weirdly intimate because it's also audibly homemade you get more of a sense of there being people on this record than you do from about half the records on this top of the pops, you know. And also, anyone who's ever met Phil Oakey will tell you that he's such a nice bloke who only wants to talk about pop music all the time,

which is brilliant because normally you go and interview people and, you know, they're there doing promotion or they want to tell you what they think about the government or something. You go and interview Phil Oakey, he just wants to talk about pop music all day. And also, he still looks the same now, because he's got one of those ageless Yorkshire faces, like a cube with a face drawn on one side of the cube. Yeah, his hair's all gone, but apart from that, yeah, he's sickeningly handsome.

Anything else to say about this? Yeah, in the credits it says, Flick Colby, dance director, right? No. What was wrong with the word choreographer? Is it that they don't think people know what choreographer means, or is there some more sinister reason? Dance dictator.

Dance fuhrer. Dance Commander. Dance Commander, that was Electric Six, wasn't it? Yes. Yeah, I quite like that, actually. So the following week, Being Boiled jumped up to number nine and would go as high as number six. Virgin Records then re-released the holiday ATEP in May of this year

while the band were on a break, but it only got to number 46 and that is the end of this episode of Top of the Pops. On TV afterwards, well BBC One follows up with a great hedgehog mystery which promises to show how hedgehogs have it off and has footage of one of them masturbating with a fence

Yeah I distinctly remember seeing that it was just basically frotting up against his fence and working itself up into a froth it was interesting they follow that up with the sitcom Seconds Out

with Robert Lindsay then there's an episode of Shoestring followed by Question Time and a repeat of Kojak BBC 2 has the Welsh drama series Ennals Point followed by Fred Housego arsing around the village of Swavesey in History on Your Doorstep, and then a documentary

about unemployment in Govan. The Nolans in Concert, then a 40-minute documentary called The Great Cover-Up about the lengths certain men will go to when they start losing their hair, and finishes off with Newsnight and the quarter-finals of the Embassy Professional Darts Championship

from Jolly's Club in Stoke-on-Trent ITV's had TVI, News at 10 a golfing documentary and something called The Medicine Men which I couldn't find anything about. So chaps what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow? We'd probably be laughing at all

those blokes trying to get their hair back I'm talking about the Hedgehog Mast a fence to be honest yeah um great album now i think um probably um bolstering our fragile heterosexuality by talking about how much we fancied claire grogan i i think yeah be talking about brown sauce just because of the wrongness of these people turning up in this context which as a kid it can be really confusing it would be like uh they'd be like switching on the news and seeing the iggy pop is the prime minister it's really disturbs you you know possibly yeah or no golden walking into the rover's return or something like that it's not done is it right um possibly the state of zoo but probably not because if you live in 1982 it's not done is it right um possibly the state of zoo but

probably not because if you live in 1982 it's a bit like living your whole life in middlesbrough you don't notice the fumes and what are we buying on saturday i um i'd be buying both the electronic records that had come out in 1978 so yeah the model and being boiled i actually did by being boiled so that's not me kind of uh trying to airbrush my past um but um i didn't actually pick up the model until a few years later second hand yeah right model boiled mirror and maybe if i was feeling flush happy and down on it and what does this episode tell us about january 1982 seems like pop music is still in rude health isn't it but it's that most tragic of things which is something starting to die that doesn't realize it like i mean 1982 was full of great

music but it was a significant drop from 81 and 83 would be an even more significant drop from 82 and in fact there's then an exponential decline in the quality of the charts for the rest of the decade so even though this is a pretty pretty fine episode of top of the pops it's a bit like watching donald campbell climbing into bluebird or or that teacher who was on the space shuttle waving and smiling all these paper party hats on the audience are somehow poignant

I agree with everything Taylor said and that closes the book on another episode of Chart Music all that remains now is for me to give you usual bullshit about how you can get hold of us even though you've already got hold of us. So, the website is www.chart-music.co.uk You can get us on Facebook

at www.facebook.com slash Chart Music Podcast and you can find us on Twitter Chart Music T-O-T-P All that remains to do now is to thank Taylor Parks. Yeah, no problem. And thank you, Simon Price. You're welcome.

And I do genuinely want a pair of Fonz shoes and a heterosexual rock and roll badge. Yeah, don't forget that. And if you do come across that picture of Jay Aston's ass. Yes. Well, that's the end of ChartMusic for this week. Thank you very much for listening

my name is Al Needham and I am the amateur team disco dancing champion of 1981 short music Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau

Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau Cynrychioli'r cerddorau I shall try

To throw a fist At what's running Right And maybe I'm a hunter For a hunter And my pain Is not a shoe

I'm bound to stay weak To think of nothing The love is sure I feel the same way Something or nothing I will my real self It's a crying song It's something staring To ruin my own brain Something so crushing I'm always mine Everyone's wrong in my vision

For blood to move, for love to bleed And my confidence in rising Has to face me sharply And I'll roach The stern's center As my glory begins to be Shining panic All at a touch of

Shining terror All at this knee Rats on the ground, shining terror, all in this city The blues they bring, a thing or nothing, a rumor, a real thing Exciting song, something is stirring, the world I am free On my own free Tension is rising It's what we are guitar solo I'm a man The Will it hold, will it break, the killer cold by the delay Pressure on, I'm not to mind, the bridge is long, the dead may die Now at last, I take the chance To hold on fast and end the dance My sleeping, your black eyes The bed is wet, I met the monster Died by a thousand hours

Come on, feel the rank Keep my belly Pull my tail To fashion out I returned to the water I retire into water, fall into its sweet sway And I smile and never be back And then tonight she'll be here one day And the bread and the bread comes

Yes, the predator becomes And the predator becomes the prey And the predator becomes Yes, the predator becomes And the predator becomes the prey This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's.

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